As always (and it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing, this is what I’m constantly meditating on), I was thinking about how growing personal autonomy is the only possible response to a world out of whack; if we don’t know who we are, how can we know how to work with our world? And there I was getting ready to cook Christmas dinner, which was to be (if you’re as interested as I am in what other people eat) green salad with celery and aioli/lemon dressing, roast duck, scalloped oysters, Potatoes Anna, and See’s chocolates.

I scoured my cookbooks for a scalloped oyster recipe I remembered as being heavenly: all bread crumbs (no crackers), minced green onions, garlic, parsley, with cream on top. But I couldn’t find it. Not in Julia Child. Not in James Beard. Not in James Vilas. Not anywhere. There were recipes with just bread crumbs. There were recipes that used green onions. But none fit the bill precisely, and I knew for sure somewhere in that bookcase was a recipe that fit the bill precisely.

You probably know the end of that story. Yep. Finally I thought to look in my own cookbook, in JAM TODAY, and there it was, the best scalloped oyster recipe ever.

That made me laugh.

It also set me off on another train of thought, while I was throwing together my own version of Potatoes Anna. I thought about why I’d written JAM TODAY in the first place–not to write a cookbook, but to kind of join together sides of life that get artificially separated: as if what you eat every day doesn’t have to do with who you are and where you fit in your world. I really wrote it to support the idea that everyone should be looking at what they’re doing (not at what everyone else is doing), and use that as a tool to understand more fully who they are and who they want to be. Because I really think that’s the only way the individual can be effective in the world, in helping move the world out of its present dead end.

So I know you’re saying, what the hell does this have to do with Potatoes Anna? And of course you have a point. So I’ll try get to that, I swear.

The way I made those oysters tells me a lot about myself. It tells me I don’t particularly like to fuss, but I like to eat. It tells me I don’t have crackers in the house, normally, and I don’t like to buy ingredients just for one special dish. It tells me…oh, it tells me more stuff than that.

And my Potatoes Anna recipe, at least the one I slapped together for Christmas dinner, tells me pretty much the same thing.

Potatoes Anna, in case you missed hearing about her before, is this wonderful dish of a kind of potato cake, crusty on the outside, melting on the inside, cooked in the oven with so much butter you could have cardiac arrest just preparing it (although you pour most of the butter off later and use it again, which is the kind of thing I’m always attracted to).

Now, if you want the most perfect potato dish ever, I recommend you follow Julia Child’s recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Like every one of her recipes I’ve tried, if you follow ever step precisely, you’ll have a most wonderful tasting dish.

But me, I can usually only do that following the fiddly recipe precisely thing once. After that, it’s a free for all. And my basic plan is: make something that fits with the rest of my life (not yanking it in another direction through its complexity), and that is going to taste really good. It doesn’t have to taste haute. It just has to taste good. And like it was made with love.

So here is my Potatoes Anna recipe for two, which really did fit that bill.

Take two russet potatoes (which is the kind of potato I usually already have in the house). Clarify a stick of butter (which means heat at low heat, skim off the solids on top, pour the clear butter away from the curds left at the bottom…voila!)–although you can skip this step and just use a melted stick of butter if you want; the result won’t be as perfect, but so what?

Take a small cast iron pan (mine is about six inches across and just the right size for a two potato Potatoes Anna)…or a small heavy ovenproof/stovetop proof skillet or dish…

Peel the first potato. Slice it thinly (I just sliced these on the side of a box grater). Heat a little clarified butter, in low heat, in the pan on top of the stove. Arrange the slices in a layer on the butter. (You’re going to turn the cake over when it’s done, so this is what will show.) Sprinkle more butter, salt and pepper, arrange another layer. Repeat until the potato is used up. Then peel the other potato and slice, and add to the skillet in the same way. Finish by pouring what’s left of the butter on top, and press the whole thing down with a spatula to get it level. Shake the pan and run the spatula underneath to unstick any sticking taters. (It doesn’t matter if it does stick, it’ll still taste good. And I don’t fuss too much over how things look, as long as they work. I mean, you should see my car.)

Stick the pan in a 400 degree oven and bake for 30 to 45 minutes, till the bottom is all crusty and brown, and the interior potatoes all tender.

Take out of the oven, Pour the excess butter into another dish to use for something else (maybe another round of Potatoes Anna). Unmold the cake on a plate. Cut into wedges, or halves, and serve.

Aahh.

For more people, just use twice the amount of potatoes and butter, and use an 8 inch cast iron pan.

This combines two qualities I find I admire when they’re in close conjunction, in no matter what the arena: practicality and festivity. And if you can manage to be both practical and festive in your own arena, I’d have to say you’re doing about the best of anyone around.

By mixed marriages, of course I refer to the one joining two wildly diverse sides: the vegetarian and the carnivore.

The other day, I had a chat with my butcher–my butcher!–about this. He was depressed because he said his girlfriend was a vegetarian, and she never let him hear the end of it.

That is sad, I consoled him. But not inevitable. Really, if there’s going to be a fight about what you eat as a couple, there’s probably something else going on, other than self-righteous belief in the rights of the cow, or aggressive condemnation of airy fairy highfalutin’ food fads. These things tend to mask something much more creepy: a desire to dominate. I mean, if you can’t let your loved ones go their own way, when it’s not hurting you or themselves, you’ve got to ask yourself why. Why exactly is it so important to you that your loved one eat the same way you do?

Well, of course there’s one practical reason. It’s a bore to constantly cook two different sets of meals. And not only is it a bore, but it’s actively disunifying. Having a meal together is not really about the food, if you know what I mean. It’s about Having a Meal Together. This is why we teach children (or we should, anyway) that when they’re invited to other people’s tables, it is rude to make a point of their own likes and dislikes: just get on with liking what’s on offer, and avoid anything that brings on allergic reactions. But you don’t dictate to others what they’re going to feed you.

Conversely, it is an act of kindness not to dictate to those you feed. A certain flexibility, and partnership, here, is what’s called for. In this, of course, as in all else in life, come to think of it. And if you really love those you’re feeding, you’ll tend to be quite anxious that they get fed what they like, as well as what’s good for them.

What’s good for one person is not necessarily good for another, of course. So every once in awhile, I just have to make, not two separate meals, but two separate courses, followed by one unified set of foodstuffs. It’s the only way to deal with diversity.

Take myself and my Dear Husband. He thrives, and I mean absolutely supernaturally thrives, on a diet of not too much fat, many potatoes, and lots and lots of vegetables. Accompanied by pints of artisanal beer and lashings of ice cream to follow.

Beer makes me feel like I’m drinking liquid bread. I can take ice cream in moderation, but not in the boatloads he happily downs (and never shows, by the way, something that would be very annoying if I wasn’t so fond of him). I like potatoes, but they’re not the Ur Food of my people. I love fat, particularly full fat cheeses. I adore vegetables. But if I had to live on them, I would turn, in a short period of time, into an anemic wreck.

This is just the truth. When I’m stressed, I need to eat some meat. I find I don’t like to eat meat every night, but when I want it, I really have to have it.

Hence the conversation with the butcher. I had spotted a nice piece of hangar steak, which looked like, as I said to him, “A piece of meat just calling out to be eaten by the sole carnivore in the family while the vegetarian has a nice mashed potato/garlic/cream/cheddar cheese baked casserole.” (And on the side, a big romaine/walnut/blue cheese salad, and a bit of beet and dill salad, too.)

That was when my butcher got all sad on me and said the bit about his girlfriend. As I say, I consoled him as best I could, but as I walked away from that market, I couldn’t help think that relationship wasn’t going to go the distance. I could see some nice tolerant girl who appreciated that he has an actually useful job snapping him up, and that other girl going on to run off with her yoga instructor.

Something like that.

And maybe the nice tolerant girl is a vegetarian, too. And maybe they have a really good time together (I started fantasizing about this, about how they’d hang out together on his days off from butchering, maybe having a drink of something in the backyard while the barbeque heats up). And maybe she would make for supper one night, when neither of them felt much like cooking, something that we have here, once in awhile.

A barbequed sausage sandwich and a barbequed portabello mushroom sandwich. Both wrapped in pita bread that’s been slathered with dijon mustard and covered with fried onions. And on the side, some potato salad with dill, and a big green salad that includes chopped bits of whatever vegetables have been left in the refrigerator.

Like this:

Heat the barbeque.

Slice thinly as many onions as you like. At least three for the two of you. Put them in olive oil on low heat in a heavy pan and let them cook for as long as it takes to get them smelling great and turning a nice mahogany color. You can always turn off the heat when they get there, and then turn it back on and give them a quick stir to reheat before the actual sausage/mushroom event. (By the way, I like to add a little soy sauce before the final heat up.)

Now, to proceed to said event:

Take the sausage of your choice. Better take two just in case.
Put them on one side of the barbeque.
Take the Portabello mushrooms of your choice (definitely take two, at least, but more will never be harmful; they’re great cold later) and roll them in some olive oil.
Put them on the other side of the barbeque.

While they’re cooking, heat up as many pita breads as you think you’re going to need. I generally just do two. I wrap them in foil and stick in the toaster oven at 325 degrees for about fifteen minutes. Twenty five minutes if they were frozen to start with.

When the sausages and the mushrooms are just about done, add some sliced cheese to the tops of the mushrooms you’re going to eat that dinner. I like to crumble some blue cheese on top, since that’s what the Beloved Husband likes best. Well, that and/or pepper jack. Your choice.

Shut the barbeque lid to let the cheese melt. Spoon out the potato salad onto the plates. Toss the salad with chopped vegetables that have been marinating in the dressing (in this case, leftover asparagus, sliced). Put that on the plates. Put the pita breads out, slather with dijon mustard, heap with onions.

Then on the carnivore’s plate, plunk down the two sausages. Right on the onions on the pita bread. On the vegetarian’s, do the same with the mushrooms.

Meanwhile, have your other half pour out the drinks preferred. (Beer for the vegetarian, in our house, and a glass of red wine for the carnivore.)

Sit down and have at it.

Congratulate yourself silently on your tolerance, and try not to be too envious of the other person’s sandwich. Remember, you don’t need to be doctrinaire about this. If one of you wants a bite of the sandwich across the way, we trust that Love and Generosity will prevail. On both sides.

As, we hope, it will in other areas of life as well.

As far as I’m concerned, moving to a new place is a chance to invade a series of new markets. So far, I’ve checked out a large regular type supermarket (better than expected), two co-op style hybrid type markets (pretty good), one actual co-op in a small Rocky Mountain hippie town (lovely but predictably expensive), one branch of Whole Foods (very disappointing, miserable looking veggies, at the height of summer!), and a terrific Asian market hidden in a strip mall, where the Internet reviews said the owner was ‘rude’ and the products ’scary’ (my kind of authentic Chinese market!).

Of course the high point of these market forays is always the local farmers’ market. I haven’t made it to the one in Boulder yet, being too terrified of the traffic of newly arrived students and their attendant families driving massive SUVs (or as one of the deans delicately expressed it: “Black Hawk Down parents on the rampage”). I’m thinking I should wait till all that cools down.

So instead we went to the nearby town of Louisville, VERY Norman Rockwell, if Norman Rockwell enjoyed iced green tea lattes, lovely place, lovely market. I especially liked the heap of what I thought was a bunch of tossed out beet greens, but which proved to be the beets themselves.

“How much for the beets?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Grab a bunch and we’ll call it two dollars.”

After I’d grabbed a bunch,

“You call that a bunch? Go back and get some more, for God’s sake!”

Excellent salesmanship in my opinion.

Then there was the stand that had heaps and heaps of green beans, including those purple ones that turn green when you cook them, alas, but which are such a pleasure to look at when you’re preparing dinner (and that’s important too, don’t let us forget). I got a pound of half and half, and then I saw they had a small pile of shallots besides, and I can’t really enjoy my green beans to the max without shallots, so they went in the bag too, along with mutual expressions of esteem for how well shallots go with green beans.

So here I am with the green beans and the shallots and a bunch of other stuff I’ve foraged from all the other markets, and I’m overwhelmed by choice.

What to do? There are so many things I CAN do, even in the ninety degree/we don’t want to eat anything but vegetables and maybe some anchovies weather.

All of them, though, start with the same step:

Top the green beans. Boil a BIG pot of water (green beans need a lot of water to bounce around in, no lid, that keeps them green for some reason, as long as you don’t overcook…), salt it, add the beans, cook till they still have a little crunch, then drain and rinse in cold water. Drain well.

Now they’re ready for all sorts of possible treatments.

If the weather was a little cooler, I might toss them and minced shallots with butter over medium heat, and sprinkle them with chopped chervil or parsley or dill.

I might mix them with a little bechamel sauce, sprinkle with grated Swiss cheese and sliced almonds, and heat under the broiler till they have a nice little crust on top.

Or I might stir fry them fast with some chopped fermented black beans and ginger and garlic and have them wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla spread with hoisin sauce.

But it’s too hot for that. So it’s green bean salad we’re talking about. Which offers an even wider selection, even when I start with those shallots, and even though, since this is a new kitchen for me, I only have one kind of vinegar–red–in residence:

Just to narrow it down a little, for all of these salads, I’ll mortar and pestle a clove of garlic with some salt and pepper, add a spoon of vinegar, and a sliced shallot or two, letting the shallot sit and sweeten for about fifteen minutes or so before I add three spoons of olive oil.

Then, it’s what do we feel like eating?

Toss the dressing, and the beans, with:

for veggies

Diced tomatoes?
Diced cucumber?
Diced avocado?

for protein

Anchovies?
Tunafish?
Hardboiled eggs?

for extra oomph

Capers?
Chopped parsley?
Chopped green or red onion?

for a little carbo punch

Diced toasted croutons?
Diced baked/steamed/boiled potatoes?
Cooked pasta?

What?

Then came dinner time. At that point, the algorithm by which I decide what goes into the meal had kind of stabilized. It’s always an equation of what I really feel like eating plus what I think the Beloved Husband feels like eating, divided by what we have on hand plus what time I have, plus how much time I feel like putting into the thing.

So this is what we ended up having for dinner: Green Bean and Potato Salad with Anchoiade/Basil/and Cherry Tomatoes.

Like so:

Put a big pot of water on to boil.

Dice as many potatoes as you are going to want to eat. I diced four large ones, since I wanted enough left for lunch. Steam them over or boil them in the water till just fork tender.

Meanwhile, make the anchoiade, which is just, really, a strong garlic vinaigrette with a can of anchovies, and maybe some capers, mashed into it. As usual, you don’t have to be too fussy about this (except for the fuss about what you like to eat, of course). In fact, I forgot all about the anchovies till after I’d made the vinaigrette (mashed garlic clove, pepper, salt, red wine vinegar and olive oil in a 1 to 3 ratio), so I just mashed them up with some more olive oil and a thread of vinegar, along with a bunch of capers and a little of their vinegar. I added that to the original dressing.

Mince a shallot or two and leave in the dressing in a big bowl while the potatoes cook.

Top a pound of green beans.

When the potatoes are done, dump them on top of the dressing, SAVING THE WATER IN THE POT. Sprinkle them with some white wine, or some lemon juice, or (since I had some open, hah!) some rose wine.

Put the beans into the water you cooked the potatoes in. Boil briskly for as long as it takes for them to be still crisp, but cooked to your liking. Drain them, sloosh them with cold water to set them and stop the cooking, drain well again.

At this point, I also added a handful of cherry tomatoes to the draining beans, rinsed them, and let them drain with the beans.

(You don’t want much added water in this salad, or any salad, come to think of it, it kills the dressing.)

When the beans and tomatoes are dried off, add them to the potatoes, and toss the whole thing. Have a taste, have a look. Is there enough dressing? If not, you can just add a little more oil, maybe squeeze on some lemon if you have it.

If you have some parsley, chop it up. I did. And I had a big basil plant, so I grabbed some leaves and tore them in, too.

Served it with some boiled corn. And a couple of glasses of rose.

And the Beloved Husband gave that sigh of sheer happiness that you like to hear if you’ve cooked the dinner on a Sunday night, and he’s going off to the second week of a completely new job the next day, and you’re hoping you’ve done enough to be a Good Wife and make sure he’s well fed while he does it too.

Really, it was like lunch with the Marx Brothers.

We had stopped in a little northern California coastal town to grab some lunch at a cafe we remembered fondly from a few years ago. What you might call a hippie cafe. You had to bring your own mugs (we had those). Everything was fair trade. The coffee had been terrific, the tea had been perfect, the food had shown signs of being lovingly prepared.

We were hungry and we were tired, and we were looking forward to lunching there again. It had been a four hour drive to get there, and we still had another four to go.

I should have known though. When we drove past to park on the town’s cliffs, there wasn’t anyone sitting outside. Lunch time, too. And the parking lot at the ‘normal’ place across the street (’Best Clam Chowder on the Coast!’) was full. I put that down to prejudice.

Should have known.

Always check those parking lots. It’s not infallible (vivid memories flood from a certain lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Susanville), but generally, the locals know. Of course they do. (The exception to this rule is when the restaurant in question is offering 2 for 1 margaritas. Otherwise, the locals know.)

They knew this time.

It was kind of hysterical, really. Alex sat outside with the dogs, and told me what he wanted. I went in and ordered. Oh, the girl behind the counter told me, we don’t have any tuna. I went back outside and came back with another idea. Oh, she said, I forgot to tell you before you went out that we don’t have any bread.

One o’clock, mind you. Lunch time. They have a whole list of sandwiches, and there’s no one in the place.

But you have that garlic bagel I just ordered for myself, right? Oh yes, she said, beaming, we have that. He can have his sandwich on that if he wants.

I went back outside. Came back in with the okay.

Then I said, “About my order–can I add something to it?”

“We’ve already started it.”

“Oh, okay, don’t worry about it.”

Went outside. Waited. Went back inside.

The girl working the kitchen said she’d burned Alex’s garlic bagel, “And it was the last one!”, but fortunately, “We have lots of Multicultural Bagels!”

So I said, sure, make it with a multicultural bagel.

Went back outside. More time passed.

The girl from behind the counter came out and proudly presented Alex’s order. We looked at it. I looked at her.

“Didn’t you finish my order?”

“Wasn’t this all you ordered?”

“Don’t you remember the bagel you told me you’d already started?”

She looked at me blankly. Alex suggested I share his bagel. He could already tell what was likely to happen if we got into it anymore.

We shared. It was okay. We had a good laugh.

Then I took our mugs in to get some coffee and tea to go. I poured the Fair Trade Mexican coffee into Alex’s mug. The girl behind the counter put a tea bag in my mug and filled it up with water.

I thanked her, paid, and then I felt the side of my mug.

Lukewarm water.

“Honey,” I said as patiently as I could–though the fact that I was addressing her as ‘honey’ showed both of us I was losing what I had, “I actually need the water to be hotter in order for the tea to steep.”

The other girl came over and silently poured some of my water out and refilled it with hotter.

It was terrible tea.

As we walked away, Alex sipped his coffee, then laughed and laughed. He laughed so hard he cried.

“Doesn’t even taste like coffee,” he said, wiping his eyes.

We threw the stuff away and I said, “That whole time they were making our lunch? They were talking about a hydroelectric plant in Brazil, and how horrible that is, and how they were going to protest it.”

And we laughed some more. Mind you, we were sympathetic. We have had our own lifetimes of thinking what we felt about hydroelectric plants in Brazil was more important than paying attention to what was in front of us.

But there you go. Horrible lunch. Horrible tea and coffee. Little things, sure. But how much were they in the control of those young women who spent their time instead thinking about how they were going to make the world a better place?

And there we were–waiting for them to help us make our world a better place.

The Revolution will not be catered, you know. In fact, we hope that when the Revolution comes, no one will be off the hook for being kind and alert and making sure that they do the job that’s right in front of them.

Because that is the only way to make a better world.

In the meantime, at least (if we pay attention) we can make a better cup of tea.

A Good Cup of Tea:

Warm the cup with a little hot water. Dump out the hot water. Pick a good tea, and put it in a linen bag, or a strainer, or a teaball of some kind. Put the tea in the cup. Pour boiling hot water at the moment it boils over the tea.

Let it steep for three to five minutes. Take out the tea.

Add the sweeteners and milks of your choice. Honey is nice. A little dash of cream is superb.

Sit down somewhere pleasant and sip.

Then get back on your own path to making the world a better place for yourself, your loved ones, and everyone else your path can reach.

If that path makes it to Brazil, that’s great. No matter what, though, don’t forget to pay attention when you’re making that cup of tea.

I try not to, myself.

The World’s Simplest Hollandaise Sauce (with thanks to MFK Fisher)

Early asparagus are a thing of beauty, don’t you agree? The first ones that show up in the market in what still seems like the dead of winter pull you up and whisper in your ear that the dead of winter thing is an illusion, and that spring is near. At least, that’s what they whisper in my ear. And even though the bundles of them from Mexico are not nearly as tasty as the homegrown multi sized ones will be much later on in the growing season, they’re still springlike and delicious enough for me to bring home bunches and bunches of them through April.

So many bunches of them, in fact, that we start eating them, not just for dinner, but for lunch, too. Pretty sumptuous lunch. Easy, too.

One half-spring/half-winter day (snow flurries in the morning, breaking into brilliant, crystal drop sunlight on trees afternoon), I decided to celebrate with such a lunch. Baked potato and asparagus. And since I was celebrating…and since The Indigo Ray has begun raising chickens and selling her eggs in competition with Dawn the Egg Lady, and had delivered a just-laid dozen and a half that very morning, without being asked or anything…I decided it was going to be baked potatoes and asparagus and HOLLANDAISE SAUCE.

Hollandaise sauce, you may or may not know, is sunlight on a plate. Sunlight and clogged arteries, sure, if you eat too much of it. But just enough of it, no more, no less, and a big pile of hot asparagus to dip in it at will, is just what you need to celebrate the end of the winter and the coming of the spring.

There’s just one problem with it, normally. It’s kind of a bitch to make. Especially for lunch. Especially if your morning goes, as mine does: work, notice the dogs have grabbed their squeaky toys and are squeaking them for all they’re worth to let you know it’s way past time for a walk, walk, lunch, back to work. There’s no time for planning, or for concentrating on your sauce, with all that squeaking going on, in the brief recreation times between work.

But I really wanted Hollandaise Sauce that day. And when you really want something, and you can really get it without too much fuss for yourself or your loved ones, I really think it’s a good idea to have it.

So I tried an experiment. I decided to see if it was possible to make Hollandaise Sauce on the top of the stove while I went out for a walk.

And you know what? It turns out you can. If you know about a recipe MFK Fisher passes on in her book “With Bold Knife and Fork,” anyway. This is a recipe she says was given to her by a dignified and pleasant older woman who liked to make Hollandaise for One as a treat, now and then. It involves melting some butter in a custard cup set in a pan of simmering water, adding one egg yolk, some cayenne, and a little lemon, and stirring it now and then while the rest of dinner is cooking, making sure the water never gets hot enough to scramble the eggs, until it’s nice and thick and hollandaise-y.

That gave me an idea. And I figured I had so many eggs, and that a lunch of just baked potatoes and asparagus and lemon would be luxury enough if my idea flopped, that I was justified in taking the plunge.

So this is what I did (for two people):

I scrubbed three smallish potatoes (that was all I had, but a small one is enough for me for lunch, and two are good for the Beloved Husband), pierced them so they wouldn’t explode in the toaster oven, put them in at 475 degrees.

Then I went back to work for fifteen minutes, until the dogs got bored and started squeaking their toys again.

Back to the kitchen:

I put two pyrex custard cups in a heavy skillet on the stove, and added water up to half their size. A heavy skillet because I wanted the pan to hold the heat while I went for a walk–a thin, aluminum one wouldn’t work here. Then I brought the water to a simmer, and cut about three tablespoons of butter into each cup. (MFK Fisher recommends a scant quarter cup…four tablespoons…and normally I would have followed her advice, but I was avoiding that Clogged Artery feel, which I enjoy at dinner, but not at lunch…and besides, Indigo’s eggs are smaller than the normal market ones…)

While the butter melted in the cups, I quickly set the table, snapped the ends off of about fourteen asparagus, and put them in a water filled sink to soak. I filled my oval asparagus pan up with water, salted it, and put it on the stove to await action. Pulled out two plates, cut up two lemon quarters, one for each plate.

When the butter was melted, and bubbling a bit, I dropped an egg yolk each into each cup and whisked it with a small wire whisk. Added some hot sauce. Squeezed a bit from each lemon quarter into each cup, and put a quarter on each plate.

Now I hit the intercom to let the Beloved Husband know it was time for the dogs’ walk. No need to speak; he could hear the frantic squeaking toy noise and knows very well what THAT means.

I gave the egg yolk/melted butter another whisk, then, seeing the BH come out of his hut down the meadow, turned off the heat underneath.

Let the dogs outside (”drop those toys, no, NOW, inside, not outside!”), went out with them, put on my walking boots, and enjoyed the spring day for about a half an hour or so.

On the way back, I wondered: was this really going to work? And when I walked into the kitchen, shedding my coat and fumbling around in the cupboard for post-walk dog treats, I looked over at the stove. Oh no. Curdled. Scrambled eggs. Must have left the water on too high.

But how could that be? I’d left it at a simmer, and turned it off. The pan couldn’t have held THAT much heat, could it?

Thinking things over, I turned on the water to boil in the asparagus pan, and when it did, added the asparagus. Then I turned my attention back to the custard cups. Taking the little whisk, I tried whisking one.I turned the heat on low just to warm the water up and encourage everything. And then, like magic, the more I whisked, the more that curdled looking egg thing turned into Hollandaise Sauce. Until it WAS Hollandaise Sauce. By the time the asparagus were done, and the potatoes, too, I had two small custard cups of, yes, that’s right, Hollandaise Sauce. Just lifted them out of the water, wiped their sides and bottoms, deposited them on the plates with the lemon and the drained asparagus and the potatoes, and put them on the table.

And the BH was suitably impressed. “You don’t have to work this hard!” he protested faintly as he poured sauce on his potatoes and dipped an asparagus spear into what was left in his custard cup. “Want me to take you out to dinner tonight?”

Silly me, I told him how easy it had been. Melt butter in cup set in simmering water. Add egg yolk, hot sauce, lemon juice. Whisk. Turn off heat. Leave for about a half hour. Come back, turn heat onto low, whisk hell out of it, and voila!

“I’ll still take you out if you want,” he said earnestly. “But whatever we have, it won’t be as good as this.”

Which was really a very nice end of a spring/winter morning, and start of a spring/winter afternoon day.

We are one of those households that always has a five pound bag of organic carrots sitting on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Why, you ask? Well, aside from the fact that we really, really, really like carrots, we’re also half an hour from the nearest store, and carrots keep really, really, really well. Also, in the winter, they brighten all that desperately depressing limpy looking produce that makes its way so flavorlessly from the central California industrial organic fields. Those Earthbound products—do they ever have any taste? Well, they’re good for fresh and organic when you can’t get anything else, but if you can….

Anyway, the best five pound bags of carrots up here in the snowy winter wastes of southern Oregon come from a reasonably local, reasonably family-ish sort of farm in northern California. They’re more expensive than the Earthbound bags, but they are so, so worth it. How worth it, you ask? Well, when I put out carrot sticks at lunch from the local bag, Alex actually looks up from whatever he’s reading and says, “Why do these carrots taste so good?”

From a man who has been known to eat disgusting plastic packaged sandwiches while traveling, for days on end, not discriminating between cheese and pickle, and olive and cream cheese (and they are, indeed, hard for even a discerning palate to discriminate between, at least if said palate is blindfolded), this is praise of an extraordinary order.

So, needless to say, when these carrots are available (and they start to come in around mid-February), I buy them by the sack load. First I fish out all the tiny, slender, pretty little carrots from the bag (they’re all different sizes, usually), and serve them unpeeled but scrubbed alongside soups or sandwiches for lunch. I peel and shred the larger carrots, and put them on top of whole wheat tortillas, under refried beans and chopped cilantro/green onions/avocado, with a little shredded cheese, also for lunch. Or I shred them and make them into a salad: lemon/thyme/olive oil dressing; or lime juice/soy sauce/chili oil; or lemon juice and walnut oil; or just a good plain red wine vinegar vinaigrette. Or I slice them and cook the in a little water and butter, add powdered ginger and brown sugar, turn up the heat and sauté till the water disappears and the carrots are nice and browned, then I toss with lots of chopped parsley…for a dinner veggie side dish. Or, of course, my favorite shredded carrots cooked in cream (see Jam Today; that recipe alone is worth paging through it, if I do say so myself). There are about a hundred and fifty other things I do with those carrots. But for now, I’m only going to tell you about one…one of the more useful ones, in fact.

This is for those carrots at the end of the bag. The ones that are starting to look a little tired, but not so tired that I move them over into the dog stodge bag with the ends and peelings of their fellows that will go into the dogs’ food when I make it up. The carrots that are still good, but not perky enough to make me want to make them into raw salads.

Pickled carrots.

This is a great recipe. I found it originally in a Mexican cookbook for pickled zucchini, which, given the zucchini situation around here at the height of the growing season, has always come in very handy. These aren’t the kind of pickles you store in jars; these are the kind you make up quickly, stick in a glass bowl in the refrigerator, give a stir or two to every day for one or two or three days, and then eat. Simple. Tasty. Cheap. My favorite kind of recipe.

First take however many carrots you feel like pickling. For two of us, and the way we use them, I’ll usually use about five or six medium ones. But the quantity doesn’t matter; it’s the technique here, which is as follows:

Slice your carrots however thick you like them. (I like them thin because I like the vinegary flavor to penetrate all the way through.)
Slice an onion, or a part of an onion, if you have one or a part of one handy.
Crush a clove or two or three of garlic.
Heat up a few tablespoons of oil in a skillet you can cover later. Throw in the carrots and the onion. Cook, stirring from time to time, over medium heat for about three minutes. Now throw in the garlic cloves. Salt.
Turn the heat down to low, cover the pan, let the carrots cook till tender—this will depend on how young and what size your carrots are. Check them from time to time and give them a stir to keep them from sticking.
When they’re tender, turn the whole mess out into a glass storage container to keep in the fridge. I like a shallow rectangular one for this particular use.
Now pour in vinegar—red wine vinegar is great—about halfway up the carrots.
Sprinkle with dried oregano. Make sure the oregano has got a good, strong, resinous oregano-ey smell. Mexican oregano is the best here, or good quality organic oregano (though I have to admit, I like the Mexican stuff in the bags you buy at Mexican markets the best).

Give the whole thing a stir. Put in the refrigerator. For the next 48 hours, when you think of it, give the carrots another stir. After about two days, they’re ready to eat…they’re not pickled enough before that for my taste, but you’ll have your own ideas.

And how do you eat them? Our favorite way is on top of refried beans on tortillas, with a little sour cream garnish, for lunch. But they’re good as a side salad, too. Or mixed into a green salad. Or…or…or…

They’re just plain good. And try it with zucchini, too…zucchini season will be here upon us before we know it. That being the way it is with seasons, after all.

It was the worst Christmas Day of either of our lives, and the best Day After this year, when one of our little dogs got into a boneheaded neighbor’s toxic butter and marijuana pail (?! yes, that’s right, and I don’t know what it’s for either, anyone who does please email me), and disappeared Christmas Eve. He must have thought he was dying, at least judging from the reaction of the other two dogs who we found had also gotten into the pail, though not quite as greedily. His instinct must have been to go to ground somewhere.

I’d made all sorts of nice things for us to eat Christmas Day. Needless to say, when it started to rain, then threatened to snow, and still no sign of the poor dog (even though we made about a million trips up and down the icy road yelling ourselves hoarse), neither of us could taste a thing. Well, except for the Christmas whiskey. But that was what you might call comfort food in this sort of situation.

One thing I’d made the day before was Chicken Liver Mousse. The plan was to have it as an appetizer, along with a lot of other little bits and bobs, before the roast duck, and potato pancakes with sour cream and salmon caviar, for dinner. But lunchtime came around, and we both—even the vegetarian. mind you—wanted more protein than the planned tomato soup had to offer.

So I toasted a couple of pieces of New Sammy’s Cowboy Sourdough, and put them out with a hunk of blue cheese, the pot of chicken liver mousse, and a big pile of cornichons.  Tomato soup in mugs at the side.

I couldn’t even finish the soup. And the tastes of everything else dulled down almost to sawdust. Only almost, though. There was something comforting about a piece of toast slathered with the pate, and dotted with pickles. If it wasn’t the taste delight it would have been on a happier day, it was soothing to eat. Even the Beloved Vegetarian Husband thought so. At least, so I assumed, as we sat there munching in silence and anxiously looking out the window to see if a little black and gray dog had returned.

We ate the planned dinner, but without much zest, and it was probably the first time in history that Alex didn’t compliment me on my potato pancakes. Also the first time in history that I only picked at a small piece of roast duck.

More whiskey after dinner, and then to bed for a night that was punctuated—at one a.m., four a.m., and seven—by drives up and down the road, looking for pawprints in the snow that had begun to fall.

By morning, the snow was a blizzard, and we had just about given up hope, when a neighbor called to say they’d spotted the dog coming out of their woodshed. Ten minutes later he was home, still shaky and groggy and red-eyed, but alive, and, shortly, well.

We cried and laughed with relief, and fed him brown rice cooked in broth, and decided to have Christmas all over again.

And you know what? That tomato soup with toast and chicken liver mousse on the side tasted fantastic. And cold roast duck was a treat that couldn’t be beat.

So I give the dual purpose chicken liver mousse recipe here, as a medicinal lagniappe, and a festive snack, along with wishes that everyone have a safe, happy 2011, and that no one dear to you or dear to someone you know is harmed.

Chicken Liver Mousse (you can call it pate, or spread, or chopped, or whatever your inclination, as long as you enjoy it):

for one honking big pot of mousse, enough to feed six as appetizers (with toast, crackers, celery sticks, whatever):

1 lb. chicken livers
2 cloves of garlic
a sprig of thyme
a bunch of butter
a little cream
a swish of Irish whiskey, or brandy, or port, or sherry, or wine open on your kitchen counter
salt and pepper

This is easy:

Melt about a half stick of butter in a saute pan. Trim the fatty bits off the livers. Toss the livers in the pan, and cook at medium heat, turning the livers. Cook about 3 minutes on each side—you want them still pink inside, and smooth (not crusty with heat) on the outside). Add two chopped cloves of garlic and a stripped sprig of fresh thyme (or a little bit of dried). Toss to mix. Add a little cream and let it cook down (this happens fast). Scrape into a food processor, or a blender, and whoosh until smooth. While this is cooling, heat the pan, add a swish of the liquor of your choice, and deglaze what’s on the bottom left from the livers. Add that to the smooth chicken livers. Mix. Salt and pepper. Add softened butter to taste, till you get the texture you like. I added about another tablespoon.

Decant the whole thing into a little pot. Melt some butter and pour over the top on to make a seal. This will keep it from discoloring, and it just adds unction when you finally dig in.

It keeps about five or six days in the fridge. Take my advice and be sure to have some pickles handy (cornichons are the best, I think), when you finally get around to spreading it on a piece of toast or a cracker. Pickles on top.

(And my own special hint: try spicy Dijon mustard spread on the toast before you add the mousse. Yes.)

You can always tell your vegetarian loved ones that it’s made from tofu. Not to fool them, just to give them an excuse. It always works around here, anyway.

By the way, it’s great with a little tot of whiskey on the side. But then, practically everything is.

Safe 2011, everyone.

The Beloved Husband and I have spent a lot of time on the road this last two months, and I was going to tell the dire, horrifying story of the Worst Meal Either of Us Has Ever Had Without Being Actively Poisoned (the WMEoUHEH With Being Poisoned having taken place in Hull, in England, and involved an ancient piece of skate and a truly bizarre avocado salad), but as the memory fades thankfully into gray memory, pushed out of consciousness by a series of subsequently smashing meals, I can’t feel the same vengeful urge I originally did. Suffice to say this dinner involved the Worst Food, the Worst Service, the Dirtiest Cutlery and Glasses, and, to top it off, a whining owner who came to the table to ask us, stunned as we were, ‘how it all was’, and then launched into a pathetic tale about how he was supposed to be building a ‘biofuels factory in Peru! for the environment!’, but because he couldn’t find decent help, was chained to the restaurant.

As I said, several soothingly lovely meals after that have dimmed the trauma. But really, you know, for lovely meals that make you forget there are actually people out there running restaurants who a.) hate food, b.) hate themselves, and c.) hate customers generally, there is no place like home.

I cannot emphasize that enough. There. Is. No. Place. Like. Home.

(Although I will say that Screen Door, on E. Burnside in Portland, Oregon, is pretty much nearly as good as home as a restaurant gets. If you go there, have the salad with blue cheese and bacon. No matter how long I live, my own blue cheese and bacon salad will never ever beat that. Terrific service, too. Oh how thankful we were to fetch up there one night.)

There have been so many opportunities to erase the infamy of that Horrible Meal on the Road, I almost couldn’t think of which one to give the recipe for. There was the Turnip/Potato/Garlic/Cream gratin, made from an enormous turnip somehow overlooked in the first scouring of The Indigo Ray’s garden. (She gave it to me to give the dogs, but on my peeling and slicing it, the turnip was revealed to be first rate human consumption type food…particularly with cream.) There were the filets of sole baked with breadcrumbs, garlic, tarragon, and butter. There was the Hubbard squash that, when melded with fried sage leaves and sweet garlic, formed the most exquisite of soups.

But really best of all, and easiest, too, was last night’s meal: Cod Filets baked with mustard and cream and Swiss cheese, served with tiny baked potatoes, a salad dressed with a mustard vinaigrette, and little dishes of cumin spiced pickled beets on the side. That was one of those dinners that looks absolutely beautiful on the plate, and where all the elements interact with each other in ways as joyful as the participants of a Balanchine ballet.

I can’t imagine why I haven’t tried that recipe before, the one for Grey Sea Mullet with Gruyere and Mustard in Darina Allen’s SIMPLY DELICIOUS SUPPERS (she got the recipe from Jane Grigson, and we all know who SHE was), unless it was because my mind couldn’t wrap around the fact that it is perfectly easy to make with the kind of fish one gets around here. But somehow, when I found these lovely Alaskan cod filets at the Co-op yesterday, it finally clicked. I didn’t have any Gruyere, and—it being as expensive as it is—probably wouldn’t have used it this way if I had, but I did have some nice raw Swiss cheese. I had cream. And of course I had Dijon mustard, which at any one time, there are at least two backup jars hidden away in the back of some shelf.

Very simple recipe. You just grate some cheese, mix it with cream and mustard, spread it on top of the filets in a buttered baking dish, pop into a preheated 350 degree oven for twenty minutes till browned. Serve.

I fiddled with this a bit, of course. For one thing, I mistrusted that twenty minutes in the oven thing, given that the filets I had were fairly thin, not the nice thick chunks of cod I remember from England, where this recipe originated.

So this is what I did:

For two people:

Preheated the oven to 350 degrees (meanwhile, the tiny potatoes were baking in the toaster oven at 400).

Buttered a baking dish large enough to hold the filets.

Then I laid one filet out, and spread it with half of this mixture:

1/4 lb. grated Swiss cheese
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
4-5 teaspoons cream

I topped that with the second filet, and spread it with the second half of the cheese/mustard/cream.

I cut this long, double decker filet in half, and put both halves into the dish.

Popped the dish into the oven. Set the timer for twenty minutes. Checked the fish a couple of times in there to make sure it wasn’t cooking too fast. (Made the salad, dished out the beets.)

At the end of twenty minutes, when the cod looked done but not TOO done, if you know what I mean, I put the dish under the broiler till it bubbled and turned brown.

Put the portions on each plate with the crackling little baked potatoes and a lavish line of mustardy salad greens. Put the plates on the candlelit table beside individual dishes of cold vinegary, oniony pickled beets. Called the Loved One to the table.

And had at it.

Not only was it a lovely meal, not only was it served and eaten with love, but we didn’t have to endure any bullshit self-exculpatory babble at the end of it from an incompetent restauranteur. That may have been the best thing of all.

Well. Except for that fish. That was maybe truly the best.

There really is no place like home, after all…

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.