I returned home yesterday to find our second weekly farm share box. As before, the box was suspiciously light. I instantly grew concerned: was the box going to be half full, as it were, or half empty?
Much as before, the contents of the box were indeed slight:
two heads of lettuce
three bulbous green onions
a small bouquet of kale (a nosegay of kale?)
a pint of strawberries
The strawberries were delicious, and the green vegetables look pristine and delicate. We should have consumed them on the spot, but they stayed in the fridge overnight. But they will soon become a salad that we'll bring to a summer social gathering later this afternoon.
But it's not really that much food . . .
I want to support the local farmer and all that. And I know it was a slow spring. But... but...
would it kill them to put in just a little bit more kale?
Next week we'll be donating the box to our neighbors, so we'll have to get a distant field report about its scope and contents. The following week I will be expecting at least a meal's worth of produce: arugula, spinach. . .
Otherwise I'm going to turn into something of a pessimist: the box will have to be overflowing in order to convince me that it not be mostly empty.
HOWEVER:
(added, 7:40 pm)
We're back to half full.
The limited palette has proven a spur to creative thinking, of a sort. With-- literally-- six leaves of kale to deal with, the usual boil-n-tumble versions of greens cooking would prove bootless. And so I resorted to scouring the fridge for bits and pieces.
There was a butt of salami in the cheese drawer, not enough to serve to guests, but enough to dice up as a flavoring agent. So this went in the skillet, and then the chopped kale. I then braised the kale with some chopped garlic, salt, and pepper. After about 10-12 minutes, I added the three cold potatoes (which weren't dried out, since I'd made them to be served cold in salad: bring to a boil in salted water, cover, and turn off the heat. The potatoes absorb the brine and cook slowly as they cool. The result is moist cold potatoes that don't have that funky used-potato flavor).
I also tossed in a rinsed can of cannelini beans, and some sage from the garden. Drizzled it with olive oil, and voilà: a tapas-like warm salad, the equivalent of sausage and kale soup. But without the soup.
So the kale was enough for a meal, after all. And the sun is shining.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
prandio ergo sum
1 comment:
Okay, so I feel a bit like Jabba the Hut on one of those self-reflective mornings even he must occasionally have, when he looks in the mirror and says, "I'm just no Brad Pitt." The cause of this is undoubtedly what I cooked for dinner last night. Iron skillet, a splash of oil, a pad of garlic butter from a local farm, two eggs beaten with a splash of whole milk, a finger-length of salami and two enormously-bulbed green onions from the farmer's market, a few twists on the peppercorn mill. Couldn't be that bad, could it? Oh yes it could. Completely disgusting. I had offered some to G., who declined, saying she was just going to be grazing on the remnants of a delicious barley-chicken stew and the last bowl of pasta from a chunky fresh pasta sauce I had made a few days before. I shrugged and gobbled the whole thing down. And then felt like Jabba the Hut. I told G. that she needed to look after N. because I felt ill. I said I was going to wretch. I went to the bathroom, gagged a bit, and then lay down for a minute. My mouth was greasy and salty and I summoned all my intellectual strength to quell the images of that "omlette" from my mind's eye.
A spoonful of coconut ice cream,from that same farmer's market, was what saved me. Fresh, crisp, cool, sweet, delicious.
What went wrong? Way too much onion, for starters. Is there such a thing as "way too much onion"? Yes. Plus, the onion was overcooked and undercooked - it was neither crunchy raw onion nor crispy browned onion, just so much soggy onion. Too much salami, as well, for such a small amount of egg. But really, it was the fat. Combining a splash of olive oil and a small pad of garlic butter is something I will do when I make N. a slice of eggy bread for his lunch, and it is a wonderful combination. But in this omlette I used too much of both. Add to this the salami oils and, perhaps, the milk fat in the whole milk, and you have a recipe for . . . groaning.
Why do I mention all this, other than to share something of a disaster?
The first is to congratulate you on what you did with the kale and salami. It sounds delicious, and you should get some credit for accomplishing perfectly a very similar meal to the one that I tried to create (farmers market products, salami, etc) with very different results. And then it is to ask - perhaps a future posting might include some of your cooking disasters?
The second is to think about this strange thing that is cooking. I realised, once again, that the implicit genius in cooking is that one cannot simply throw what one has into a frying pan; nor can we make superficial appeals to "moderation" or an "ideal" or "golden "mean". There is something else to it. Is it a science, based on the interaction of physics (heat, energy) and chemistry (the combination of particles, of acids, of the ur-substance that is garlic)? is it art, the intuitive act of creation that brings disparate elements into something original and whole and yet also recognisable? Does it transcend this science-art binary or is it the perfect intersection between science and art, the point where the two meet?
The third is a recommendation to all Food Boom's readers to have some organic coconut ice cream on hand. It solves all problems: physical, gustatory, emotional.
Oh, BTW: "tea-dark water" and "like watchful herons", from previous posting? Very, very nice.
Post a Comment