I love okra. I really do. And not just because it’s a strange outsider, looked at askance by the modern world. I mean, I hate kidneys (one of the few foods I do dislike, after an unfortunate bout making a steak and kidney pie which left my kitchen smelling like a New York sidewalk on a summer day).  Just because it is what it is. Pretty. Modest. Unpretentious. A riot of different textures.

I ate it a lot when we lived in England, since every Asian market carried it–bhindi is its name on the Indian menus that were always my fallback position in provincial towns where you took your life in your hands every time you went into a restaurant that didn’t serve poppadums. I always ordered them. And at home, I cooked them in curried vegetable sautes on top of rice with lots of chutney (or ‘pickle’ in the UK).

But my favorite way to cook okra was and is Madhur Jaffrey’s way, which she claims is Japanese. Very likely. Whatever its nationality it’s terrific…and comforting, too.  Also the perfect hot weather side dish. So I was very pleased when a heap of the pale green stuff appeared at a local farmers’ market. Someone’s growing it around here. Thanks for that. Of course I scooped it up and brought it home to have for dinner.

This is how:

As many okra as you feel like having. It’s easier if they’re all around the same size. Madhur Jaffrey picks through the heap to find the smallest ones, and I do that too, when there ARE smallest ones. But it’s still a pleasure if they’re all medium to large.

She recommends about 24 okra for 4 servings, but that, I think, is REALLY a side dish, implying a lot of other side dishes to come…for us, 24 is the least we’ll eat. On the other hand, we do, as I say, love okra. You’ll have your own ideas.

Bring a pan of water to the boil. Doesn’t have to be a big one, just big enough to hold all the okra under water. Add the okra to the boiling water, and bring back to the boil, boil for about 2 minutes–or until when you bite into one, it’s just tender and nowhere near overcooked mush.

Drain. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. Drain again.

Cut into 1/2 inch lengths, discarding the tops. Now you can either mix it with the sauce, or set it aside and mix at the last minute. Jaffrey says to mix at the last minute. But I kind of like it marinated a little.

Try it both ways and see what you think.

For the sauce for about 24 okra:  2 Tablespoons soy sauce to 1 teaspoon mirin, with a little smudge to taste of wasabi paste mixed in.  If I cook more, I adjust upward, of course.

It’s good room temperature, but I like it best chilled.

And I like it really best chilled nestled up against a tangle of hot linguine mixed with butter, soy sauce, chili oil, minced scallions, and diced, salted cucumber (just dice, toss with some coarse salt in a colander, let sit for about a half hour, then squeeze out extra liquid…add to the noodles at the last minute before you serve).  That’s what we had the other night. If I’d had some cilantro, I would have chopped that and added it to the noodles with the cucumber.

Extra soy sauce and butter on the table to add at will.

We’d both had a very hard day–hell, a very hard WEEK–and there is nothing like butter and soy sauce on noodles to comfort you at the end of a tough run of anything. Unless it’s soy sauce and butter on noodles next to chilled okra, soy sauce, and wasabi. That’s the most comforting of all.

Toasted cheese sandwiches with fried eggs. And a salad on the side. With a glass of wine. And a glass of water.

This does not sound like much, does it? Sounds too simple. Too everyday. Too…dull.

But last night that was what we had for dinner. And it was one of the most perfect meals we’ve ever shared, one of the most thoroughly enjoyable. One of the most memorable.

Why was that, now? I have to think.

It was different all right, from what picture the words conjure up.

The difference, I have a feeling, is in the recipe.

So here is a recipe for: Best Spring Dinner for Two.

Take one cool spring evening, at the end of a long, cool spring.  Light a madrone fire in the hearth. Sit with the newspaper and a glass of rose and your husband and the dogs. (These ingredients can be changed to suit what you have in your pantry. For example: Take a warm summer evening, or a nippy autumn evening, or a cold winter evening. Play Mozart low rather than light a fire. Or Brian Eno. Sit with reading material of your choice, or sewing, or knitting, or…or…or… For company, choose from a wide variety of possibilities.  You get the general idea, I’m sure.)

Then…

For two…

Cut four good slices of sourdough bread from a loaf made by a friend, preferably a friend who is the best cook you know and who runs your favorite restaurant. It helps if the bread was delivered to the store by your friend’s brother, and it’s even better if your friend’s brother lets you pick the best loaf out of the basket he’s delivering to the shelves, while you exchange words about how nice it is that the weather has finally warmed up.

Butter two of the slices. Unsalted is best. Unsalted and made within 100 miles is even better. Dijon mustard on two of the slices. It is nice if you live in Dijon and the mustard comes from someone you know, but if that’s not possible, you can spare a moment to fantasize about going to Dijon some day and eating all that Burgundian food without gaining any weight.

Slice some extra sharp cheddar and some Monterey jack cheese thinly, enough for two sandwiches. Best if you know where the cheese comes from. If you have passed the cows who give the milk for the cheese on one of your holidays, and speculated aloud on exactly what kind of cow IS black and white, anyway?, that’s tastier still.

Divide the cheese onto the two slices of mustard covered bread. Cover with the buttered bread.

Turn heat on low under a cast iron skillet just big enough to hold two sandwiches. Add a dollop of unsalted butter. When it’s melted, add the sandwiches, and continue to cook slowly on low while you –

Go into the garden and snip off with scissors the smallest and widest variety of salad leaves you can find, preferably into a wide and beautiful bowl. Arugula. Mizuna. Tatsoi. Red Leaf. Add small leaves from herb plants as you pass–thyme, oregano, mint, lemon verbena, marjoram, chervil. Use the scissors to snip bits of chive on top. Don’t stint on the quantities here. As many leaves as you think you can eat plus a bit extra is good.

Back to the stove. Check the sandwiches. If they’re golden and the cheese is beginning to melt, slide some more butter down the side into the pan, let it melt, and turn the sandwiches over.

Take out another skillet, one just big enough for four fried eggs to fit in a neighborly way together without crowding.

Take out four eggs. These should be eggs from someone like Dawn the Egg Lady, who coddles her chickens in a warm shed built against her house, and feeds them table scraps. Preferably they should have been collected earlier that day by Doug, who is married to Dawn the Egg Lady, after you drove up their drive and he suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to get them earlier. You can talk to Dawn while he grabs them out from under the hens, preferably chatting with her about the madrone stacked in their driveway that Doug is now cutting into lengths for you to burn next winter. Discuss delivery of the wood until Doug runs back lightly holding six eggs (how does he do that?), which he adds to an old egg carton already holding another six, meanwhile avoiding being knocked over by one of their three enthusiastic Labrador dogs.

For some reason those eggs taste best. Don’t ask me why.

Melt some butter in the skillet at medium high heat. When the butter sizzles, crack four eggs, one by one, first into a cup to make sure the yolk doesn’t break, then slide each egg into the skillet.  Salt and pepper. Whatever kind you like. For example, Maldon salt is tasty if you had a nice conversation at US Customs when you brought back four boxes of it from the UK about how hard it is to find in Oregon (”but not down here, where you guys are”). Even tastier if the woman at Customs tells you what HER favorite salt is. People in San Francisco airport love to talk about food.

Clap a lid on the pan, turn off the heat. Set the timer for seven minutes.

Set the table. Light the candles. Pour out glasses of water. If the water comes from a spring you share with your neighbor, and your husband has just that day unplugged a lot of leaves from the lines so it’s running particularly clear, that’s even better.

Check the eggs. The whites should be set, but the yolks should still be deep gold and runny. No hard yolks for this dish.

Check the sandwiches. Are they gold on both sides?  Yes? Good.

Announce dinner is imminent so your company can pour themselves glasses of whatever else they think will go well with this dinner. Dark beer is nice. Rose is my personal favorite.

Toss the salad leaves with a tiny bit of salt and some grinds of pepper.  Then add a capful or two of walnut oil. No lemon, no vinegar–not on this particular salad. Toss again, and pile lightly, divided between two wide, white, Wedgwood plates.  Leave room for the sandwiches, though they’re nice nestled on top of the salad, too.

Cut the sandwiches in half. Arrange two halves each on each plate.

Top each half with a fried egg.

Sit down at a table that looks out onto a peaceful scene. A forest. A garden. A neighborhood street. Even a desert. Whatever spot you pick, for maximum tastiness, it should be a well-loved place.

If the light is just starting to turn dark blue green, that’s even better.

Toast your loved one with your glass. Spear the yolk of one egg so it runs all over your sandwich half. Eat a bite of salad. Savor. Pick up the yolk soaked sandwich half and eat with your hands.

Laugh. Repeat.

Have another sip of rose.

And think about how very lucky you are, and hope fervently that as many people as can be are, that night, lucky, each in her or his own way, too.

Okay, here were the parameters:

I’d been to the market. Actually, I’d been to TWO markets…no, make that three if you count the new, helpless looking Asian market in the undertenanted mall by the freeway…so I had lots and lots of stuff to choose from for dinner.  Great looking cod, a nice fillet of it just big enough for two. A huge bouquet of chard with green stems. A bag of recently dug Oregon potatoes with papery skins. Among others.

However, the day had not only consisted of those three markets, but also of a mall visit to Macy’s, an ineffective attempt to find a pair of jeans at the Gap, a semi-annual t shirt and sock buying trip to Target (I don’t even bother trying anything on; I just throw all the small black t-shirts on sale into a cart twice a year; that’s my seasonal fashion shopping), a half hour swim at the  Y, a bento box lunch, discovery of flat tire, fixing of flat tire, visit to post office, and a double header at the dentist involving semi-annual cleaning and preventative cavity filling (complete with mouth distorting novocaine, very nasty).

So.

I was tired.

I was very tired.

And yet, when I thought about my usual “I am tired but I have a nice fresh piece of fish from the market” choices I felt that kind of unutterable boredom that one gets, from time to time, when confronted with one’s own default settings.

In other words, I just didn’t want another piece of griddled fish atop some brown rice with asparagus and/or salad and/or avocado and/or buttered peas on the side.  No. Please. Anything but that.

(And yet the aforementioned is one of my favorite dinners. Usually. Which just goes to show you have to pay attention or fall slowly into a slough of non enjoyment, which is almost a sinful slough, considering how much there is to enjoy if we just think about it.)

So.

I poured myself a glass of wine and went to sit in my big chair by the fire with a stack of cookbooks. But everything I looked at just made me depressed and not hungry and even more tired. (It gets like that if you try to do too many errands in one day in the hopes of getting them all out of the way.) There was this one rather exotic recipe for Jamaican codfish curry that involved coconut milk and a bunch of other odd ingredients that I just happened to have, but when I mentioned it to the Beloved Husband he looked at me blankly before saying, “I’m sure anything you want to make will be great.”

Which was not the answer I was waiting for.

And also, I thought petulantly, I’ll have to clean the cilantro tonight if I do that.

I took another sip of wine.

Now this is what I do when I get into a cul de sac of this sort.  I just sort of sit and stare into space. And while I’m sitting and staring into space, I try to pay attention to what’s going on inside me. And I ask whoever is in there (and there are a LOT of inhabitants of that space; try looking inside if you dare; I bet you discover whole circuses having a time completely independently of whatever you thought YOU were doing): “What do you feel most like eating? What sounds good to you tonight?”

Back came the plaintive answer:  “Hollandaise. I want some hollandaise sauce. Butter and egg and lemon and tabasco, please. And don’t make a palaver about cooking it, either.”

This really shouldn’t have been startling given that whenever my body is tired out, it always seems to crave full fat. And lemon. For some reason it perks right up at lemon.

Also, I remembered, I learned years ago (from M.F.K. Fisher, of course) how to make a gentle hollandaise without much fuss and with minimal clean up needs.

This is how:

While you’re cooking the rest of your dinner, put a pan with water on top of a flame tamer and heat it to just below boiling. Then, for each person, take a pyrex custard cup, and cut a scant 1/4 cup of butter into each. Put in the water and let the butter melt. When it has melted, turn off the heat. Add the freshest egg yolk you can find, one to each cup, and stir with a pretty spoon (this whole recipe is an exercise in gentle aesthetics, I feel). Then, keeping an eye on that water (you never want it to get close to boiling), turn on the flame to the lowest setting. Every so often, give the contents of the cups a stir. If they thicken too fast, you’ve got the heat up too high; turn it off. If they thicken too slowly, just leave the heat on…but watch the contents of the cups to make sure the egg doesn’t scramble. The idea here is to gradually meld the egg to the melted butter and thicken it like a sauce. You should be able to dip your finger in the water around the cups at all times, though it should be warm to hot all the time, too.

Then when the sauce thickens, add squeezes of fresh lemon, drops of tabasco/hot sauce, a bit of salt to each cup. Stir and taste. When it’s thick enough, you can just let it sit in the water until dinner time, heat turned off. Just pull out the cups, wipe the water off the bottoms, and put them on the plate for each diner to use whatever way she/he wills.

In this case, my custard cups went on a plate with baked potatoes. And chard leaves washed, shaken, and braised in a covered skillet with a teaspoon of olive oil, a sliced garlic clove, a crumbled red pepper, and some salt.  After stirring them around, I just clamped the lid on them and let them simmer till done, then squeezed lemon all over and left it to be eaten as a warm salad.

For which, the main course was a perfectly smashing, simple, terrific cod cooked in foil with no oil. (I really felt that hollandaise was enough fat for the whole meal; the teaspoon of oil in the chard was kind of cheating.)

This was how.

When I stuck the potatoes in to bake, I stretched the cod out on a plate and shook some coarse salt on each side of it to firm and flavor it. Back into the fridge until about fifteen minutes before dinner.

Meanwhile, I made sure the oven was at 400 degrees (which since the potatoes were already in there baking was a cinch). Put a baking sheet in to heat up. Then I took two big pieces of aluminum foil, and then I made thin slices of half a lemon. Thin shreds of some green onions. Minced a garlic clove. Chopped a handful of parsley.

I spread half the lemon slices on the two pieces of foil. This was instead of oil, to keep the fish from sticking. Just lay the fillets on top of the slices.

Then the fish came out of the fridge.  A quick rinse, though I didn’t bother to pat dry, seeing as how they were going to steam anyway. Cut into serving size pieces. Divided the pieces onto the two lemoned up pieces of foil. Scattered the other ingredients on top (the other thin slices of lemon, the green onions, the garlic, the parsley), half on one serving, half on the other. Folded the foil over to make neat little packets.

And put the packets into the oven, onto the baking sheet.

Set the timer for fifteen minutes.

Checked on my hollandaise sauce. It wasn’t thick enough yet…I’d been very conservative about the heat, since I was spending a lot of the time it was on the stove sitting belligerently by the fire. But a glass of wine later, and the prospect of a dinner I really wanted to eat, and my mood had mellowed. Now I was ready to fuss about the sauce.  So I turned the heat on under it, gave it another stir, set the table, filled the water jug, cleaned a knife or two…all the while keeping a sharp eye on that sauce. When it was as thick as I wanted, I turned off the heat and gave the sauces another stir.

Then out came the packets of cod.

You can just put the foil packets on people’s plates, though I would recommend, if you follow that route, that you have a plate available to put the foil wrappers on, and that all you have sharing the plate with the fish is a lone wedge of lemon and some nice starchy thing to soak up the juice. (Rice? Mashed potatoes? Pureed garbanzos, anyone?) There’s going to be juice. And it’s delicious, too.

But with baked potatoes, I didn’t want any juice. So I carefully poured the juice off each packet into a bowl, to use as a soup base for lunch the next day (chopped onion wilted in butter, one diced carrot, sliced chard stems, cooked with the juice and some veggie broth, then pureed, nutmegged, salted, peppered, and a few tablespoons of cream added…chopped parsley on top, served with toast. Delicious.).

Just put the cod on the plates with their now melted robe of lemon slices/green onion/parsley/garlic. Nestle them up next to the custard cup with an individual serving of hollandaise sauce, and the chard salad. Distribute baked potatoes at will. And serve.

And be happy. Well. That’s the important part of the recipe, after all.

So I was having a chat with the head librarian at Cannon Beach Library the other day, because they’ve very kindly invited me to come talk about food there (two of my favorite things, food and the Oregon coast, in one–on March 13, at 2, in case you’re interested), and he said he only had one problem with the way I cook.

“What,” he objected, “if you just want something to come out exactly the same way as the way you had it somewhere else?”

I turned that one over in my mind.  For a bit, in fact, And in that moment, I had a flash of understanding: I am a person who is constitutionally incapable of wanting one moment to turn out exactly like another moment. I like them all to be different.

“Well,” I said. “You might as well give up on that one. Because you can’t.”

“You CAN’T?”

“You can’t.” I said this flatly and firmly, because you really really can’t.

“WHY can’t you?”

“Because,” I said, “you’ll never be in the same place, with the same ingredients, with the same equipment, with the same atmosphere, with the same audience, in the same mood, more than just one time.”

He laughed.

“I’m serious. You can look at Audrey Hepburn wearing a little black dress in Paris and say, ‘I want to look just like that.’ But you’re not going to.”

He laughed again.

Look. Let’s not even get into the question of why you would want a recipe to taste exactly the same as the way someone else does it. No, wait a minute. Let’s get into that question. Why do you want to? I don’t mean you shouldn’t want the food that results to give you and the people who eat it as much happiness and satisfaction as the original recipe–that’s a given. I mean, why do you want it to taste the same?

I guess what I’m saying is: you have a chance, every time you cook, to figure out who you are and what your world is like. These are the two questions that interest me mainly, and food is just a way of getting more answers for me, not an end in itself. Which is why it is endlessly fascinating. And not just that–endlessly productive. I don’t mean endlessly productive of meals (though there certainly is that benefit!), but, rather, endlessly productive of insight. Insight that leads to a firmer understanding of one’s likes and dislikes, and, through that, to building our autonomy. Autonomy, I truly believe, is what each of us owes her/his world–because only an autonomous adult, who knows who she/he is, and knows what her/his duties and rights are can participate in making our world better for everyone.

And what else are we in it for? I mean, I ask you.

So if that’s my goal, why on earth would I want to cook something just like Martha Stewart? Although I must say, I’m slyly interested in what the way Martha Stewart cooks says about her.

Here’s what I cooked last night. And I guarantee you won’t be able to replicate it in your own home.  I guarantee I’ll never be able to replicate it in my own home…not again, anyway.  Well, just look at the list of ingredients.

Fettucine with broccoli, shallots, roast tomatoes, blue cheese, and parmesan (for 2).

1/2 package fettucine, which turns out to be lighter weight than it says on the package, so about 7 ounces rather than my usual 8.
1 head of broccoli, peeled, chopped, and steamed.
1 shallot minced and let to sit in a tablespoon of lemon juice to sweeten
3 1/2 roasted tomatoes, diced
a nubbin of blue cheese, squished between your fingers
a nubbin of parmesan, grated
a couple of minced garlic cloves
a squish of anchovy paste
the olive oil that was left in the bottle, rounded out by some walnut oil
a dab of butter

Cook the fettucine. While it’s boiling, warm the minced garlic cloves and anchovy paste in the oil. When the pasta is done to your liking, drain, put back on the stove in the still warm pot, add the hot oil and garlic/anchovy, and the shallot.  Toss. Toss with the blue cheese and parmesan. Taste for salt. Toss with the broccoli and roast tomatoes. Taste again. If you think you need it, add a dab of butter and toss again.

Serve up with a lemon wedge and salad. Or be lazy like I was, and serve by itself with tangerines  and dried fruit to follow.

If you like, wear that little black dress you saw on Audrey Hepburn. You won’t look like her. But you might look better. You’ll look different, anyway, and more like yourself, which sounds to me like more fun in the end.

(WARNING: The above does not apply to baking.  That was another question the nice librarian asked me, what am I crap at cooking? The answer will come as no surprise: anything that requires precise measurements. Baking requires precise measurements unless you want to end up with something somewhere between soup and a hockey puck when what you’re aiming for is a cake. Baking is a precision activity. Even I highly recommend you try to get the same results time after time with baking.)

Even in the most devoted cook’s life, there comes that inevitable time when, for reasons of anything ranging from the worst tragedies to the most simple ennui, you just can’t focus on fixing a meal. Even for those of us who love to cook, and think of it as a high point of the day–sometimes you just wake up and can’t do it. Or sometimes someone who lives around you wakes up and just can’t do it. Maybe someone broke a limb, or a car broke down, or you’ve just spent a week cooking for a house full of guests.  At any of these times, what comes into its own is the Neighbor Meal.

The Neighbor Meal is one of the warmest, best, and simplest ways of connecting yourself in…well, the neighborhood, however you define that.  And you can define it a lot of ways.  The immediate vicinity.  A group of friends.  A group joined together by a common interest.  Any group, really, that is connected by a thread of community.  And the best way of strengthening that thread is to give or exchange food.

We have a lot of Neighbor Meal traditions out here in the little alpine valley where I live.  When a woman has a baby, we do a roster so that she gets enough food to feed the rest of her family for a short period while she settles in with the newborn.  (My split pea soup–see below–goes over big here, especially with families with kids.  And you can freeze it ultra successfully.) When someone is ill, we all go on the alert and bring food. If someone goes to the hospital, we leave food at their home for the remaining family.  All of these things.

I have noticed, in the preparation and presentation of the Neighbor Meal, that the person getting the most out of the gift of food is not always the recipient Neighbor.  Quite often, it’s me.  I’ll never forget the courtesy with which the Indigo Ray, in the hospital for an operation on cancer many years ago, received a demented, distracted box of lemon squares.  I’d completely forgotten that she didn’t eat white sugar or white flour, in my total freakout that she was in the hospital at all. But she accepted the gift for what it was: a way of soothing myself, while I fooled myself into thinking I was soothing her. And I suppose just the fact that I had brought something and was trying to hide my own upset strengthened the thread, too.

And then there was last year when I went to a friend’s house, where she was slowly dying of a terrible disease. She who had loved food as much as I do, she couldn’t eat solids any longer.  I spent two days making three different kinds of soups, liquidizing them carefully, with a necessary obsessiveness: any little bits left unstrained would be a positive danger.  The next time I saw her, she could no longer speak, but she wrote out appreciative thanks about the soups, which she claimed to have eaten for a week after I went back to the States.  I didn’t believe her.  I knew those soups had been pecked at by her distracted husband, and then thrown away. But I loved her even more for the grace that knew I needed to be needed right then, and that the only way I could express my own love was in the kitchen. I loved her all the more for knowing and acknowledging that, and the last time I saw her, the day before she died, she wrote vigorously on her white board again about the soup and how good it was. That was all for me. I had meant to comfort her, but she was comforting me. Although maybe, now I think of it, her comforting of me was a comfort for her, too.

So the thread, complex and beautiful, is woven.

I thought of this last night, when, tired of myself, which meant, inevitably, tired of my own productions, even my (gasp!) food, I gratefully turned to a hamper that my neighbor across the street brought over on Christmas Day. Homemade tamales.  Spinach enchiladas. Spicy Spanish rice. Salsa verde. I heated them all up, tossed what lettuce I had with a diced avocado, minced green onions, walnut oil and a squeeze of lime, and crowded everything on a plate. And it was not just entirely delicious (I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood of Extremely Talented Cooks), it was comforting, too…to think that she had packed that basket and brought it over just when I needed it. I had needed it, and the fact of being a part of that neighborhood web fed me as much as the delicious food on my plate. And I think she liked bringing it, too.

(And in case you want a simple Neighbor Meal to take to someone, here is my recipe, cadged off a bag of split peas, for The Perfect Neighbor Meal Split Pea Soup:

Wash and sort a pound of split peas. Put in a large soup pot with 8 cups of water, 1 cup chopped celery, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped carrot, a bit of dried thyme rubbed between your fingers, a bit of red pepper, and a bay leaf. Bring to a boil, and them simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour, until the peas are tender. Salt. You can mash the peas with a spoon, or blend the soup in a blender or processor, or (what I usually do) just leave them the way they are, since when you reheat the soup, the peas will cook some more and start to dissolve on their own. (It tastes best at this stage, and best of all after you’ve frozen the soup, thawed it, and reheated.) At the last minute, add fresh ground pepper, and serve with grated cheddar or a dollop of sour cream on top.

If you want, you can add a ham hock to the start of the process.  But it’s absolutely swell without, and that way you don’t have to inquire if the neighbors at the receiving end eat ham.

There is no child in the world who doesn’t love this soup. Trust me on this one. And it will comfort you to make it almost as much as it will comfort them to eat it.  Trust me on that one, too.)

It’s really annoying when fish you get at the supermarket isn’t as fresh as advertised. Take yesterday. I’ve spent a lot of time scoping out each market’s way of doing things—the Co-op’s dependable, but they don’t mark their package date so you have to figure out how fresh the stuff is by the sell by date…but the butchers there are terrifically helpful when you ask. The cheap/good market could care less about its fish counter, so unless I see something I know is a deal, I don’t bother about them. But the one fish counter I thought I had learned to trust was the Upscale Market. Upscale Markets, in my experience, frequently have the best deals hidden in the midst of the rest of their overpriced/underripe/extravagant luxuries inventory. They’re the ones who get the best cheap imported pasta from their distributor. They’re the ones who have the best markdown when you buy a case of wine (15%, as a matter of fact). They’re the ones who mark their slightly browning organic rib steaks down the farthest.

So they’re always on my shopping radar. I stop in there now and then to see what I can find. (Also, because they’re upscale, the bottle return area is never as jammed and filthy as at the other stores. A shopping hint.)

And lo! My patience with them was apparently rewarded. One day I was in there, looking at a pile of wild red snapper, all of which had been packed about, oh, a week ago. So I rang the little bell. And the nice man who came out, when I timidly asked if he had any snapper packed that day—his eyes lit up. He asked exactly how much I wanted, and when he brought out the package, it was cheaper than the stuff in the case. “Just went on sale,” he said, evading my look, and apparently going back to work. But I could see him watching me out of the corner of his eye.

He was happy. I knew he was happy. I was SURE he was happy to finally have a customer who actually NOTICED HOW FRESH THE FISH WAS.

Subsequent trips proved me right. His eyes began to light up just seeing me approach the counter. He has given me the freshest snapper, the freshest salmon, the freshest tuna, the freshest halibut that was in the store that day. (We’re inland, so we’re not talking sushi fresh. But the best I can get, anyway.) And, as a lagniappe, he’s also cut down enormous pieces of skirt steak to just enough for a dinner for one. More, he always looks happy to do it.

So I should have known better when I went in yesterday, and he was nowhere to be found. There were stacks and stacks of packages of all kinds of fish: snapper, salmon, halibut, flounder, sole…and all of it packed the day before, or, worse, DAYS before.

Only the cod was packed that day.

When I rang the bell, at first no one came. That should have warned me too. So I went away and came back and rang it again. A rather harried woman answered. And said, when I asked if she’d packed anything that day, “No, it was all yesterday.” Pause. “Is there anything else you need?”

No, I said, beating a hasty retreat. No, nothing at all. I grabbed the package of cod on the way out.

I should have known better. I really should have known. It might have been packed that day. But it had been sitting around there for at least a day longer, and she doubtless just got around to packing it that morning.

My guy never would have done that.

I should have known. At almost ten dollars a pound, I REALLY should have known.

But we have to live with reality. I’m a half hour away from the store. I can’t just run back and return it. The stuff’s not bad, just not as fresh as it should be. Which means, when I open the package at the dinner preparation hour that night, and get a whiff of cod where none should be, I give a sigh and rethink my dinner plans.

No point in just grilling it. Better to tart it up with something. So I sighed again, spread the fillet out, shook some coarse salt on both sides, and popped it back in the fridge. The salt, I figured, would firm it up and give it a better flavor.

I then gave the Beloved Husband a choice: Jamaican codfish stew, with chiles and coconut milk and cilantro? His eyes lit up. Then I said: Cod and Potato Pie. And his eyes (predictably, given that the potato is his ur-food) REALLY lit up.

So Cod and Potato Pie it was. Which in French is Cabillaud au Gratin. And the very refined recipe I have for it in a lovely book called The Art of Simple French Cooking calls for celery salt, and using a sieve to push the potatoes through, and scalding the milk that goes into them…and a couple of other things I either didn’t have, or didn’t plan on doing.

No matter. Our cod and potato pie was delicious. Easy, too, relatively speaking (once I got rid of that sieve and that scalding anyway).

And—very important—not many dishes dirtied in the making of this pie! Very important.

Here’s how:

First I made a court bouillon to use for cooking the potatoes and then the cod. This is far easier than the name makes it sound. I threw, in a saucepan, a broken carrot, a broken up piece of celery, the insides of a garlic bulb (about six small cloves stuck together), some peppercorns, a bay leaf, a parsley stem, a sprig of thyme. Brought to a boil and simmered it till it smelled nice.

Then I peeled and chunked a pound of potatoes. Put them in the court bouillon, brought it back to a boil, turned it down.

In a heatproof mixing bowl, I stirred ¼ cup of milk, 2 tablespoons of butter, a bunch of chopped parsley, and a couple of cloves of minced garlic. Pepper. No salt. There’d be enough with the cod soon enough.

Preheated oven to 400 degrees. Put the heatproof bowl in the oven until the butter melted and the milk was warmed.

Took it out. When the potatoes were done, I scooped them out (leaving all that nice bouillon behind) and into the mixing bowl. Also scooped out the garlic bulb, popped the cloves from their skins, and added them. Mashed away with a potato masher, adding a little of the bouillon to get a nice texture.

In the rest of the bouillon, I added about 2/3 of a pound of cod, salt shaken off (not too severely), cut into pieces to fit the pan. Just brought it to where the heat shimmered on the top of the broth, and cooked till it flaked (about eight minutes, more or less). Then I scooped out the fish, chunked it up with my fingers, removing any bones, and tossed it in with the potatoes.

(I SAVED THE BROTH. Just clapped a lid on the pan and put it in the fridge. It’ll make a terrific veggie soup later in the week, all I have to do is add diced potato and carrot and celery and a chopped onion, and then…)

I stirred all this together, then decanted it into a casserole dish. (I forgot to butter the dish first. I ALWAYS forget to butter the dish first. And for the life of me, I can’t really see that it makes that much difference one way or another…)

The top of the dish, I spread with bread crumbs, which I made by crumbling a piece of New Sammy’s sourdough bread. Then I dotted the whole with butter. And popped back into the 400 degree oven until the house smelled wonderful (about fifteen minutes, give or take five or ten).

We had this with corn on the cob, and a tomato and marjoram salad (thanks, Paul, for the tomatoes). And it was just great.

Although it would have been even greater if the fish had been absolutely fresh.

But when you’ve got lemons, as long as they’re not utterly past the due date, make cod and fish pie. Or something like that…

And I’m afraid I consider it my duty as a citizen to tell the Upscale Market that they have to pay more attention when they pack their damn fish…

So there was a good article by Michael Pollan in the NY Times about the rise in fascination with watching ‘others’ cook (ie professional chefs), and the decline in home cooking (also, just as a fascinating aside, mentioning research that shows the rise in obesity as linked to the decline of the home meal). And there was tweeting about it, one can almost imagine this as being practically knee jerk, a no-brainer, about how Michael Pollan wants us women back in the kitchen.  Which made me immediately yelp, “you GUYS.  you’re missing the point!”

Because it’s exactly at this point that feminism has gotten into a cul de sac, even a slightly resentful, surly cul de sac. I mean, you can see why the feminism of the late Fifties through the Seventies emphasized that girls aren’t allowed to do what boys do.  And, I’m afraid to say, you can also see why they were encouraged to emphasize this and campaign about this by the mass media and the corporations.

Look.  In a patriarchal society, what the boys do automatically becomes more important than what the girls do. This means, for example, that being an investment banker becomes more important than being a nursery school teacher. Okay, we all know that one. We all bemoan that one. But do we look at the roots of it and what it really means? It means, of course, that being someone whose default setting is to beat the hell out of the other guy and be the dominant one gets more prestige and more resources than someone whose default setting is to care for and nurture others.

I daresay just about anyone out there can see where THAT got us.

So feminism, I have to say, has got to go back to work on this one.  It can’t just be about doing what the boys do. It has to be about upholding the importance of what the girls do. Because it’s more important to eat and to feed your loved ones than it is to make money.  Well, it is. It IS.

In other words, all you women who were forced to give up cooking for yourself and your family (and all you men, too, as a matter of fact) because you have no time anymore, do not hide out in the faux virtue of thinking that means you’ve taken a step forward out of the kitchen.  Unh uh. What you’ve done is you’ve walked into a rabbit trap with your eyes wide shut. You’ve given up something of basic importance to the achievement of your own autonomy for the convenience of a world that regards you as just something to be milked.  Work long hours. Spend money from working long hours.  Work longer hours to have more money to spend. Get less and less gratification in the process. Get madder and madder, and so get sold more and more crap that promises you a reward for how mad you are.

This is not feminism.  This is being conned in a big, big way.

Okay, you really don’t like to cook? Don’t cook then. It’s like sex, though. There are probably some people who don’t authentically like sex, but my guess is they’re a very small group of people. On the other hand, if you’re forced to have sex, you’re going to hate it worse than cleaning out the attic on a hot day.

You get my point? There has to be freedom from constraint, there has to be leisure enough to contemplate, there has to be calm before you can know who you are and what you want. And once you do know that, my own feeling is that you’re going to love sex, you’re going to love nature, and you’re going to love FOOD. I mean, if you’re a human being. How can you help it? I mean, unless you’re so drugged up by pharmaceuticals, recreationals, audio visuals, and terror that you can’t even feel your own self.

If that is true, stop it right now. I’m not kidding. You’re not just making your own life worse, but the lives of those around you, and the world, too.

And one way to stop that is to recast Feminism as support for those virtues of nurturing, compassion, partnership, and just all round pleasure that have always been denigrated in our culture as ‘girly stuff’. I personally adore girly stuff. Girly stuff needs to be reclaimed as a ruling power in our culture…before it’s too late.

So let’s start reclaiming it.  Start with something easy.  Let’s start with a Baked Potato.

For everyone who says cooking at home is too difficult, too time consuming, a Baked Potato is the ideal riposte. Of course, you do have to have an hour before you eat it. At least before you eat it the first time (you should bake a lot of Baked Potatoes at once, save energy, use the leftovers for all manner of easily thrown together meals). But with a little planning, this can be managed.

First buy your potato. This should be an organic one, not treated with sprouticide, which is a particularly hard to get rid of pesticide. This should also be one that has a nice dusky, papery skin, no sprouts, no green stuff (that green stuff means incorrect storage, and makes you a little nauseous if you eat it; just cut the green part off…but you want the skin with a baked potato so try to get one absolutely ungreen to start). Scrub until clinging dirt unclings. Stick a knife into it in a few places so it doesn’t explode when you cook it. Put in oven (toaster oven ideal for this) at 400 degrees for about forty five minutes to an hour, depending on its size and how done you like it. Squeeze it gently or poke with a fork to test doneness.  It won’t hurt to leave it in the oven for longer (just makes the skin even crispier), or turn off the oven and leave it warm till you want to eat it. Then EAT IT. Split it in half, mash with a fork, top with topping of your choice: unsalted butter. sour cream. hot sauce. garlic mayonnaise. You make the call.

With a salad and a piece of corn, this makes a pretty darn good meal. It probably cost you twenty cents for the potato. All you had to do was wash it, pierce it, stick it in the oven, and pull it out again. This is probably less trouble than it takes to unwrap a hamburger from Wendy’s and then throw the detritus away.

As for those extra baked potatoes you made? Many choices available to you. Dice ‘em and fry ‘em later with onions for hash browns. Scoop out the pulp and mash it with cheese and butter and milk, bake it later. The skins can be cut with scissors into lengths, basted with butter and hot sauce, and baked till they taste like high class versions of potato chips.

And so on.

If you do this feeling that you’re degraded by being in the kitchen, consider this: who is actually cooking the meals you are actually consuming? Is it right to have someone so much lower on the economic food chain, so dissed and overworked, being the person who provides you with something essential to your well being? Is this the kind of culture we want? Is this the kind of culture Feminism is meant to help deliver?

I think not.

Back to the Baked Potato. We had ours for lunch. And for dinner, they’ll be hashed, served with a frittata and a tomato and chive salad.

Now, THAT’S a Feminist meal, for sure.

I was set on having Salad Niçoise, last night, or at any rate, a bastard version involved orrechiette– I mean, it was so damn hot. Then there was this fresh red snapper at the market; I had to buy it, of course I had to buy it.  Good price, too.

But when I got home, it was still too hot. And we were both in miserable moods. I didn’t really want to cook.  So I thought–have the fish tomorrow night. Because I’ve discovered a sneaky way of keeping it fresh overnight, one that’s perfectly obvious, actually, if you can mix categories and think salt cod. I sprinkle the filets on both sides with coarse salt, cover them, and pop them in the fridge. They’re fresh as they’ll ever be once they’ve left the market that way. Next night (tonight, that is), we’ll have them griddled, then served with lemon and soy, with black rice, corn on the cob, and a sweet tomato/basil salad.

The last few days have been a bit of a push, what with Alex having discovered a lot of footage he went to a great deal of trouble to get went bad; for some reason, some technical glitch, it has to be reshot.  And I, of course on the same day, found that the printer for EAP somehow left off a crucial graphic element on one of the book’s covers.  Can’t figure out why or how it happened, but, of course, must be resigned to it, since there are now a few thousand odd copies printed like that.  So needless to say, we’re both walking around the house, smiling tenderly at each other, and not saying much–what can’t be cured must be endured, as they say. But here’s the thing: it actually helps to have a gentle, good meal when that kind of upheaval rolls through. It actually helped to have that salad last night, with some good rosè.  And, dammit, it’ll help to have that fish and everything else tonight. Not to mention how easy it is to fix, which is also helpful on a day where it feels like technical issues are pressing you into the ground so you can’t get up…like you’re in a Cocteau film. The best cure for that, in my opinion, is a simple, delicious dinner, quietly held with a loved one, where both of you tacitly agree not to talk about business.  Just the food, the dogs, how lucky you are to be healthy and in love.

I can’t tell you how to do that last, since you’ll have your own healing conversational gambits (and if you don’t, you should be busy developing them as crucial to a modern marriage),but I can tell you how to grill Salted Red Snapper.

Here’s how:

About three quarters of a pound of good, fresh snapper filets for two people. Lay them flat in a baking dish and sprinkle both sides with coarse salt.  Leave for at least thirty minutes, but overnight is fine, if you need to wait.

When ready to cook, heat up a ridged grill pan on the stove. Gently wash the salt off the filets, pat them dry. Paint them with olive oil (I paint one side, then lay that one down first in the pan, and paint the other side while the fish cooks).  No need to salt, obviously.

When the pan sizzles, put the fish in so the filets lie flat. Grill for about three minutes, then turn. There should be nice black griddle marks on the filets. Cook until done to your liking (with us it’s about three minutes more, but we like our fish a bit underdone).  Serve with steamed rice (black rice is always nice here), corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes with basil and balsamic vinegar.

You can make a little sauce to go on the fish and the rice by combining equal parts soy sauce and lemon juice. Or, you can just do what I do, and put lemon wedges and a cruet of soy sauce on the table. Make your own sauce there. Why not?

Eat slowly, maybe with a little glass of wine the color of your choice. Speak gently and kindly. Try to stay off sore subjects. And tell your loved one how proud you are of them, because if you’re like me, you forget to do this as often as it crosses your mind.

It’s late spring again, and that is always a wonderful time for food…although, come to think of it, when isn’t it a wonderful time for food? But this is a particularly mild and pleasant time of year, and tonight we’re having a turnip omelet made with tiny white turnips so peppery and sweet they make me smile to think of them.  And to start, sauteéd oyster/puffball/and Zeller’s bolete mushrooms found by the Beloved Husband while he was raking up the dead pine needles of winter from the meadow floor, tossed with young turnip leaves and a little cream and garlic and wine.  The omelet (which I always like at room temperature) will come after, served with thinly sliced sauteéd potatoes.  Yum.

But I’ve more or less shared all those recipes before, so now I’ll tell you about a pizza I discovered a few days ago, and how terrific it was.  I had all these sweet onions (onions always being inexpensive this time of year, even organic ones, which are the only ones you should be feeding yourself and your loved ones, given the toxic qualities of sprouticide), and a bag full of mushrooms, and various other odds and ends, and a lot of lettuce from the garden.  So something, I thought, something to go with a nice lightly dressed salad, that would use all of those things.  Well, pizza, of course.  By which I don’t mean the kind you order in, though that is delicious, most times, or the kind I normally make, which is a biscuit dough patted into a pan and covered with various things.  I don’t know, I felt like a thinner kind of dough, but one that didn’t need yeast or rising time, and I found just what I needed in Richard Olney’s PROVENCE THE BEAUTIFUL cookbook.  He recommends a pastry dough made of 2 cups flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, 1/4 cup of olive oil, and a 1/4 cup of lukewarm water.  Mix it in the usual way (in my case, throw it all in the food processor, and, if it’s too dry, add a tiny bit more oil and water bit by bit till it’s the right consistency). Roll it in a ball and let it stand for about an hour at room temp.

Now this made a terrific dough, easy to work–I could have just patted it into the pan, but it was even easier to sprinkle with extra flour and roll out to the desired shape.  This is enough dough to fit a cookie sheet, which is what I would have done if we’d had company.  But since it was only the two of us, I split the dough in half, wrapped one in plastic and froze it for another time (which is, in fact, the time I’m going to tell you about in more detail…but hang on).  Rolled out the other, and covered it with sweet onions, about a pound and a half sliced, that I’d cooked for a long, slow time in a crowded pan to keep them from browning.  Just got them to be white and meltingly tender, about an hour’s worth of cooking.  Then I mixed them with a little fresh chopped thyme, spread them across the dough that I’d rolled into a small pizza pan, crisscrossed them with whole anchovies, dotted them with black olives, and peppered the whole.  Preheated the oven to 500º, and then popped the pizza in for about fifteen/twenty minutes.  Just terrific.  PIssaladière is what that’s called, when it’s at home in Nice.

A week or so later I was somewhat harassed to think of something for dinner quick, and I still had all those onions and mushrooms lying around.  So this time, what I did was the best, I think, as sometimes seems to happen when one operates under pressures of this sort. First I pulled the pastry out of the freezer and let it defrost for a couple of hours. (Luckily I’d remembered I needed a dinner option earlier that day, which if I didn’t have time to do anything about it, at least I had time to pull that dough out.)

Then this is what I did:

I sliced a couple of onions and sauteéd them over medium high heat in a nice wide pan that gave them plenty of room to move around and caramelize to their heart’s content. While they did that, sternly ordering them not to burn while I was gone, I rushed out and picked myself a bowl of salad.  While I was at it, I picked a branch or two of sage. Then I hurried back into the house, oh the relief, the onions were just turning nice and brown, not burning at all, and just needed a stir. I chopped the sage and threw that in with the onions, stirring.  I kept at them till they were a beautiful mahogany color, then I salted them and took them off the heat.

When I was just about ready for dinner, I preheated the oven to 500º, and sliced as many mushrooms as I thought would fit on top (about a half a pound, as I recall).  Then I rolled out the dough, fit it into the pan, spread the cooled onions on top and scattered the mushrooms all over.  THEN I rooted around in my cheese drawer and found a wedge of gorgonzola, which I proceeded to crumble with abandon all over the mushrooms.

Into the oven it went for about fifteen/twenty minutes, until the house smelled heavenly.  Pulled it out, poured a glass of wine, tossed the greens with a little salt and walnut oil and a spritz of lemon, served some of both on our two plates, and in about twenty minutes all of it was gone.  I don’t know how that happened, but I know we had a good time while it did.

Then there are those times where you just have to make decisions about what you’ve got time for.  And I really hate giving up making meals for myself and the Beloved Husband just because I’ve got a work binge on.  It’s making those meals that’s a lot of my entertainment in life.  I love thinking about them and making them almost as much as I love eating them.

So there I was, with only a week between trips out, and with a huge amount of work to get through, too. Well, the obvious answer is to get in fast foods, or eat out, or just starve, I guess, and since none of those options is an appealing one, I just had to think of some way ’round.  Really, the only way ’round is to just get as efficient and creative as you can, and cut yourself some slack when you hit your own personal efficiency and creativity ceiling.

This was the attitude I took.

I hit my own ceiling when it came to shopping.  My brain was just too full of other stuff to really focus on what I might need for a series of a.) varied meals and b.) meals that would create leftovers that I could leave for the Husband when I was away on the next trip.  Now, I know a lot of you women out there are saying, “let the guy get his own meals, for God’s sake!” and I agree, I totally agree, in fact, HE totally agrees, bless him.  But the thing is, I LIKE leaving meals for him, just like (I assume) he likes getting in the wood for me every winter.  I LIKE it.  I could give it up, but I don’t really want to if I don’t have to. It adds something to my life.

Well, so here were my parameters: Not much time.  Just what I had in the cupboard and fridge already. An attenuated attention span.

(It helps when you’re playing this kind of culinary game that you have loved ones who appreciate what you do, and are not given to finding little picky things to complain about to bring you down when you can’t do as much as you usually do.  Although, if you have the latter, I suggest seriously thinking about either retraining them, or keeping them well away when you have key work to do of your own.)

I was so involved in my own work that I didn’t even notice what I cooked last night.  I mean, I can barely remember eating it. But I think it was good–and I know it gave me some leftovers for the husband to reheat (mashed potatoes with pesto spread in a baking dish, covered with grated Swiss cheese and baked till bubbly; carrots and parsley; salad with avocado and blue cheese).

So today I had to finish a proofing job.  Well, I am not crazy about proofing, so I take it one chapter at a time. One or two. Or three. I did this at the kitchen counter. And in between, I wandered over to the stove and the sink and made:

Vegetable soup for lunch.  Chopped a couple of onions (I knew I was going to make a couple of other things, too, from those onions, so get it done all at once), put a bit of chopped onion in a pan with some melted butter and curry powder.  Peeled and diced the lone potato left from last night’s potato fest, added that to the pot. A little thyme. Covered with a couple of cups of water and brought to the simmer. When the veggies were tender, I added the leftover carrots from the night before and cooked to blend flavors.  There was so much of it — flavor, I mean–that I added a little more water, with the idea of leaving one extra serving for Alex for a lunch when I’m away. When that was done, shoved it to the back of the stove to wait for a final enrichment with a little butter, a sprinkling of parsley and toast for lunch.

Back to the proofing.  Two more chapters.  Even three.

Then back to the stove.  Heated two separate skillets.  In one, a dollop of sunflower oil as the base for enchilada sauce. In the other, olive oil as the base for a sauce for polenta and mushrooms.  Split what was left of the chopped onion between the two and sauteed them till they were golden.  Then opened a can of crushed tomatoes and puree and put half in one skillet, half in the other.  Chopped garlic and added to each skillet (of course, who did you think you were dealing with, anyway?) Added three minced chipotle chiles and some of their sauce to the enchilada sauce. Added a sprig of rosemary to the polenta sauce. Salt to both.  Then I needed to thin them.  Leftover beer to thin the enchilada sauce. White wine to thin the polenta sauce.

Put them both onto simmer and went back to proofing.  Three more chapters.

Back to the stove, gave them both a stir, turned off the heat and covered them.

And tonight, the enchilada sauce will drape some corn tortillas that will then be rolled around grated cheese and minced green onion, lined up in a baking dish, and covered with more sauce, cheese, and onion.  Baked till done, and the leftovers can be reheated at will by the Beloved Husband. We’ll eat refried beans with this (I already have them in the fridge from another day), the beans spooned on top of lettuce,  and an avocado and cilantro salad on the side.

Lunch tomorrow will be reheated beans on top of grated carrot on a whole wheat tortilla, the whole thing topped with more cilantro and avocado and grated cheese.

Then dinner will be polenta stuffed with sauteed mushrooms (just happen to have some lurking in the fridge), and topped with tomato/rosemary sauce and grated Parmesan.  Plenty of leftovers, terrific reheated. We’ll have it the first time with what’s left of the lettuce in the fridge, mixed with grated carrot, as a salad.

I finished the proofing job right on time. Now on to packing for the next trip. But in the meantime, we’ve got to eat, and, as you know, my motto is: Anything you’ve got to do, you might as well have a good time doing.

And I’m serious about that, too.