July 2006 Archives

Chicago is brain-warpingly hot. Today I drove a mini-van through the leafy green suburb of Naperville, settled in 1831, with the air-conditioning on high. Shiny children passed by on their bicycles, squinty men in shorts dragged brown paper bags full of trimmed branches to their garages, and my cat hid in the shadows under the deck, panting for what might well be, the first time in his life. My aunt's mini-van slid around the corners on invisible tracks, the drizzle steamed.

It's melt into the tarmac hot, and if you've seen An Inconvenient Truth and passed a cool June in San Francisco, this sort of heat might seem worrying. You know, the end of the world is nigh and it's basically all my fault, sort of thing--although ditching my twelve year old VW in Portland with my brother and becoming a pedestrian again is a step in the right direction, there's nothing like finding out about how wasteful and excessive you are, to make your life suddenly feel wasteful and excessive. This last part is especially true if you're unemployed and eating with the fortitude of a seasonally starved female penguin.

I wonder how to negotiate the pleasure and the guilt of consuming so much and in such luxury, when there are both the proverbial and actual starving children in (insert whichever place your parents used to say, India for me), when there are bigger things happening near and far. Around me, the polar ice-caps are melting, husbands are kissing their wives good bye and heading to front lines, and my greedy eyes are fixed on dinner. Alinea to be specific. That greystone in Chicago's swank Lincoln Park neighbourhood, so unassuming I drove past it twice before I noticed it, all shining glass and steel, all dark wood and red lilies, and I almost forgot about the horrifying, haunting image of a bare, snowless Mt. Kilimanjaro. Such is the power of a good dinner--takes the edge right off the end of the world, so to speak.

When you've been married twenty eight years, as my parents have, or fifty three, as my grandparents have, there are bound to be arguments. For example, what is the best sort of long grained rice to pair with my grandfather's lamb kofta curry? When should you add the garam masala to your masala? Is beer good for a cough?

On my parents twenty-eighth anniversary, incidentally, Bastille Day, I had a crisp buckwheat crêpe folded with melted Emmental and smoky ham at the Chez Machin Crêperie in Hawthorne for breakfast, did a tour of the Marmite scented Widmer brewery, tasted an Indian Pale Ale, a Hefeweizen and crossed the magical street the pipes of bubbly beer run under. We wobbled home in time to do a bit of prep for the next evening's tapas dinner before showering and heading downtown to Higgins, on the recommendation of Oregonian passenger 2C who sat next to me two years ago when I flew to Portland from London for my brother's wedding.

So we reached Portland in the noisy Jetta with our bags of Japanese snacks and mini bags of funnions after twelve hours of mountains, the air gradually getting heavier and warmer till we reached the narrow, daisy lined drive of my brother and sister-in-law's cottage in Portland. The first real meal we planned was a tapas evening to match twenty or so beers selected and paired by my brother. Another of Ximena's "recipes" suited the occasion perfectly: melon soup with candied jamon--we used yikes, one made in America. Portland to be specific. In fact, it seemed everything we've been eating and drinking has been from Portland. Glyn put together some goat cheese beet raviolos garnished with all the tiny herb flowers from the garden, and spicy arugula also from their garden.

At New Seasons, where we did the grocery shopping to supplement the homegrown goods, a group of twelve or so teenage girls followed a rather good looking nutritionist around the produce aisles. "These are fresh raspberries," he grinned, "they're organic and grown right here in Portland." The girls tasted the little fruits, keeping their eyes fixed on the handsome nutritionist. A girl with long blond plaits referred to her questionnaire, and asked about the history of the organic movement in the NorthWest. One gets the feeling that Portland is raising a generation of conscious, smart eaters.

Plane tickets? Check.
Long-term parking reservation? Check.
Rental car reservation in Nashville? Check.
Plan to purchase fancy sandwiches en route to airport to eat with relish on plane while other passengers glare resentfully at their bags of peanuts and Wheat Thins? Check.

So I guess I'm on my way to Tennessee. Where it is 99 degrees. Hah. Clearly, San Francisco, and its cool climate, has made me weak. I am going to need many, many paletas to survive.

When a method works consitantly, I find I don't like to deviate from it. For example, I roast chickens at 425 degrees without basting, and am inherently suspicious of recipes that ask me to do otherwise. I cook bacon in the oven, burgers in my cast iron skillet, and salmon in a hot pan, flesh side down until crisp, then flip it and finish in (the apparently ubiquitus) 425 degree oven. I like my salmon about medium inside, and I've cooked it this way enough that I can sort of sense when it gets there, rarely letting it coast to well-done.

A few weeks ago, I came across some wild salmon with flesh so moist and pink, so well-marbled, it seemed unfortunate to subject to blistering hot stainless, too harsh, like slapping a kitten. I rembered a lovely dish I had last summer at Plouf where the salmon was poached in olive oil and served with succotash. It highlighted the salmon's buttery texture in a way I was anxious to emulate.

I poked around a little, looking for information on how to correctly oil-poach fish. I settled on the manner Anna Hesser describes in Cooking for Mr. Latte. She tells you to pour olive oil to almost cover the fish, put it over low heat, and to spoon warm oil over the top of the fillet once it begins to cook. She says it is almost impossible to overcook this fish. Ha-hah. My results were less ideal.

I've been trying to write this post for a week now, but honestly, I haven't known how to start. For various reasons, as the result of various outings and errands, I could convince myself I simply didn't have a moment to sit down and post. I'd compose the beginning lines in my head sometimes while Stephen and I drove back up the 101 from El Granada in the dark, but those thoughts were inevitably too maudlin for public consumption.

It was wrong to wait, there's so much to tell you. Most of it is very exciting. Really, this summer should be a pretty neat time here at 2 Tasty Ladies. First though, the inevitable thing. The real reason I couldn't make myself post this before was because I was in denial. If I wrote about what was happening, I'd have to acknowledge it, and I hadn't any desire to do that. See, my partner in blog and I, we've shown a funny tendency to be to behave in the fashion of weeping, melodramatic Victorian heroines when one or the other of us is going away. I refer specifically to a scene in the Baltimore airport on January 2, 2004, of which we rarely speak. Too embarrassing by far.

So, to avoid such a moment for as long as possible, we went our business with only the faintest attention paid to the inevitable. First we had the Last Barbecue. Then, on the Fourth of July, the Last Dinner at Tejal's house. Then the Last Dinner at my house. Then Last Pizza on the floor of her packed up apartment. Although we openly called it Last Something or Other, we didn't really believe it. We'd roll our eyes about it, and then fall back into the comfortable pillow of denial.

On Monday night, Stephen and I drove down to El Granada for a final time. We got dressed up and went to dinner at Navio in the Ritz Carlton with Tejal and Glyn. Our dinner was marvelous, the service fantastic. We talked about food, beaches, what our accents say about us, how Milton had his temperature taken at the vet. For a few hours I almost, almost forgot. We went back to their empty apartment, made small talk for a few minutes, and then we had to go. I was feeling on the verge of Victorian meltdown. Goodbyes were, at long last, said, and hugs of the sort that you hug when you know it has to last a long time were hugged. A few hours later, I don't even think they went to sleep, Tejal and Glyn drove away from their apartment, their garden, from the Bay Area. They headed off to visit family in Portland, and then Chicago before Tejal stops over for a few months in New York before joining Glyn in London.

We were so lazy on Tuesday. Seriously, I don't know if there were four people on the planet having more trouble keeping their heads up than Tejal, Glyn, Stephen, and me yesterday. We were old dog lying in a warm spot on the porch lazy.

Tejal and Glyn had attended a going away to-do the night before while Stephen and I saw an A's game, stayed for the fireworks afterward, and indulged in midnight BLTs at Mel's. Naturally, we chose not to mount an elaborate Independence Day hullaballoo. I roused myself long enough to make a chickpea and goat cheese dip with some spicy olive relish, Glyn made burgers and some terribly yummy vidalia onion spread. Dessert would have been a no go had I not recently come into an enormous amount of strawberries.

I have a habit of buying huge qualities of fruit from roadside stands, despite the fact that as a member of two-person household, five pounds of nectarines are likely to rot before they ever get eaten. I recently fell prey to eight pints of very ripe strawberries for five dollars. I knew chances weren't great that I'd think of a way to use them before they went squishy, but darn it, I had to try. After two days, the berry smell that rolled out of the fridge when the door was opened almost knocked me down. It was time for action

Another place I'm feeling a bit sentimental about is Georgia. While I can drink a coke without, thankfully, thinking about the bottling museum, and all the boring trips with visiting family and friends, I cannot eat a Vidalia without thinking of Atlanta, where I tasted my very first of those sweet, well-mannered, but still mildly pungent, Southern onions.

The Vidalia is the official state vegetable in Georgia, whose red, low sulfur soil, perfectly illustrates the principle of terroir with the onions that grow in it, sweet and crunchy as apples. All states here have their own official flower, vegetable, bird, fruit, and whatnot, though nothing--peach, sugar magnolia, even coca-cola bottle--reminds me more of Atlanta than a lit up yellow sign for the Waffle House towering above the highway, odd letters missing like teeth.

The (terribly amusing sounding) Vidalia Onion Act of 1986, limits the growing area for the onion, and preserves the name much like A.O.C so no one can start calling their simlilarly sweet onions grown in another state Vidalias. Lately, they're available in California, and not especially expensive, so, I slice them raw into salads and sandwiches, chop them into salsas, and today, utterly caramelised two of them down into a few tablespoons of golden, sweet squish--a tangy, spicy condiment to go with our 4th of July burgers. Martha's bringing a chickpea spread with pita, and strawberry buttermilk panna cottas for afters--can't wait! The apartment may be in a sad state of piles and empty bookshelves, but we've enough Hefeweizen and tasty treats to cheer ourselves up.