For years now, the only canned tuna I’ve bought is one that caught my eye, one day, on the grocery shelf. Its label was a plain white strip of paper with simple black lettering that said: ‘Fishing vessel Pisces Albacore. Product of USA. Contents: Albacore. Sea Salt.’ And on the back : ‘You are holding North Pacific Albacore Tuna, hook and line caught by the fishing vessel Pisces, then hand packed by a quality Oregon microcannery. Our albacore is filleted and canned with no additives except 15 grams of sea salt….This product is humanely harvested with no accidental capture of other species. Dolphins play at the bow while we fish!”

A hand drawn picture of a blue tuna holding a red heart was on the side.

It was, and is, at $4, an expensive can of tuna (although less now than when I first started buying it – now it seems a very reasonable price for almost half a pound of toxin free omega 3 fish). I started buying it because I was worried about mercury levels in most canned fish, and I vaguely remembered that wild caught tuna from Pacific Northwest waters showed negligible levels of the stuff. Also, that sentence about the dolphins, with its final exclamation mark. Something about the whole label spoke to me of real people with a real job, working a small business their way. Anyway, I bought it

Once we’d tasted it, we never went back. I mean, there was no comparison between what came out of that can and Chicken of the Sea. Big meaty pieces of filet, with a hearty, honest taste to them. Everything I made with that tuna – and once I’d tasted it, I treated it with the respect it deserved – tasted like a party. Tuna and lentil salad with pita bread. Tuna sandwiches made with sourdough bread and aioli. Just the tuna by itself tossed with olive oil and lemon juice, on top of a bed of greens. It was all great. And it was all more than worth the money. From time to time, I wondered about that label, and about the people behind it. I wondered where they fished and how they fished, and, more importantly, why. Most of the time, though, I just enjoyed that tuna. I paid attention to it. It insisted, by its very integrity and taste that I pay attention to it. Which is what I want from my ingredients whenever I set out to make a meal.

Then, one day, I was shopping at my local Co-op, and there was a minor hubbub going on at the counter where they usually showcase products and give out samples. As I passed by, thinking about something else (goat cheese, as I recall, and whether Ken had arrived yet with the day’s shipment of just baked bread), my eye was caught by a pyramid of the cans of what I by now thought of as My Tuna.

“Ah!” I said, skidding to a halt. “My Tuna! I’ve been buying that for years!”

(I’m afraid I do this a lot. Talk out loud, I mean, before realizing I’ve done it, and in public places, too. However, the advantage, I have discovered, is that nearly always someone answers back.)

Then I noticed her behind the cans. She was a little worried looking, and a little worn, but she had those sparkling eyes you read so much about. They sparkled now, and darted and shone. “That’s MY tuna you’ve been buying,” she said proudly. “And I’m so glad to meet you. I always wonder about our customers on the other end.”

After assuring her enthusiastically that I had often wondered about her as well, and heartily praising her tuna, I finally got to ask: “Who made that label?”

“I did!” she said, and she laughed again. “I drew the fish! I was so proud of that fish! I’m glad you liked it!’

Then, as often happens, we settled down to talking. And she told me her story.

“When I was in school out on the coast, I started doing temp work going out on the fishing boats in the summer. Well, you know how it is. I fell in love with one of the guys, and we got married, and then we had our own boat. And we worked and worked and worked – you have no idea how hard we worked – but we just couldn’t make it pay. Too much competition from the big boys. It was just too hard. So I finished my nursing degree, and we moved inland close to here. I liked it there, had a nice job, and he went into construction. Everything was fine, I thought.

“Then, I don’t know what happened, whether it was a mid life crisis, or what, but one day my husband just woke up and said, ‘I’m sorry. I have to go back to fishing. That’s what I have to do.’ I thought to myself, well, this is just a phase he has to go through. He’ll get over it. So I kept the house here and my job, and watched him move back to the coast and buy another boat. I’d commute out to keep him company – you know that drive’s beautiful, but it’s a long one. And after a couple of years, it dawned on me. This wasn’t a mid life crisis. And it wasn’t going to go away.

“But I probably still would have stayed here, except that a friend of ours, a guy that fished from Alaska on down, who really knew what he was doing, went out one day alone in his boat and disappeared. They found parts of his boat floating later, but no one ever knew what had happened, whether there’d been some kind of explosion or what. And I said to my husband, ‘Well, that’s it. You’re never going out on a boat alone again. I’m coming with you, and whatever happens to you will happen to me, too.’ So I sold up the inland house and moved out and we went back to fishing.”

Fortunately, this time the timing was right: shoppers were more aware of how hard the larger fleets were on the environment, on dolphins especially, and how the tuna packed by big business was frequently of inferior quality. This time, while it was still hard, they found they could make the fishing pay. But of course, if you’ve got a small business, you can’t just fish. You’ve got to go out and sell your fish. And that’s what she was doing today.

She gave me one of their pamphlets, with a picture of her standing, grinning widely, dressed in oilskin, holding up an enormous tuna. And I noticed there was no website, no email address, just phone numbers: 541 266 7336 and 541 821 7117. I didn’t ask her about that. I could just imagine how, along with everything else they had to do, how impossible it would be to have a web presence as well. And somehow, I found that a very comforting thought. The people who caught my tuna were too busy in the real world to worry much about the virtual.

We parted with warm expressions of esteem – and me with another couple of cans of tuna in my shopping cart. And I thought about her again the other night, during a heat wave, when I made a tuna nicoise pasta salad so good we both sat there with our glasses of rose just staring at it between bites. Not for long, though, since it was gone fast.

This was how, for two people for dinner, with a little left over that got doctored for a great lunch the next day:

In a colander in the sink, I put four diced Roma tomatoes, a half a sliced yellow onion, a chopped scallion, and a julienned jalapeno pepper. Tossed these with a tablespoon of coarse salt, covered with a plate and weighted it down to push out any bitter juices. I let those sit for a half an hour or so while…

In a big salad bowl, I put four halved anchovy fillets, a few chopped capers, about twelve pitted and torn Kalamata olives, a half a bunch of parsley minced, two quartered hard boiled eggs, and a can of Pisces tuna, broken into chunks. I squeezed a little lemon over this and tossed.

I put a pot on to cook a quarter pound of ziti pasta. And made the salad dressing:

In a mortar, five cloves of garlic, the rest of the can of anchovies, some pepper, a little salt, the oil from the can of anchovies. I mashed all of this to a puree, then added red wine vinegar to taste.

Rinsed the salted vegetables in the colander and let them dry out a little while I cooked the pasta. Then added the vegetables to the salad bowl, drained the pasta in the colander, refreshed and cooled it with cold water. Shook the extra water off, then added it to the salad bowl with the rest of the ingredients, and the salad dressing.

Tossed very gently so as not to mash the eggs too much. Served on a bed of spring greens, with lemon wedges on the side.

(The next day, for the bit that was left, I added two grated carrots, another chopped scallion, some more minced parsley, some lemon juice and olive oil, and tossed the whole with a good amount of lettuce. We had that on top of whole wheat tortillas, topped with a little Greek yogurt, and a very good lunch it was, too.)

There’s really something different about cooking and eating food made by people you’ve met in circumstances you can understand. It makes you feel more closely knit into the social fabric, and it makes you feel less alone. And of course, by paying a little more, you’re helping to reweave that social fabric, not just standing by helplessly watching it fray. Not to mention how much better everything tastes when you sit down to dinner with your loved ones.

To order Pisces Tuna, contact Sally and Daryl Bogardus, PO Box 812, Coos Bay, Oregon, 97420, USA. Phone numbers: (001) 541 266 7336, or the cell phone (001) 541 821 7117. Sally and Dick also have smoked albacore, Chinook salmon, smoked salmon, and various gift packs.

A heat wave rolled through here, which was kind of piquant, given that all the snow hadn’t yet melted from the phenomenally long winter. Very amusing to walk past snow drifts in 90-degree weather.

So there was no gentle, spring like, entry into summer cooking. It turned hot overnight. The first evening, I just defrosted some pesto left over from last year’s garden, and tossed it with a lot of rigatoni, then topped the servings on the plates with cold chopped Roma tomatoes marinated in balsamic vinegar. Next day, mixed what was left of the tomatoes with what was left of the pasta, added a handful of chopped rocket from the just-starting garden, and that was lunch. That night, seaweed and cucumber salad tossed with cold buckwheat noodles, and served with wasabi and soy sauce at the table. Leftovers next day for lunch.

By that third day, I was getting bored with noodles. I really wanted potato salad. But I really wanted some fish, too. I thought about a kind of modified salad Nicoise, made with canned tuna (the kind caught by a nice couple in their own fishing boat off the coast near here — more about them later), potatoes, tomatoes, and a good garlicky/anchovyish dressing. But as dinner got closer, I started to get this craving for pickled herring.

Now I pretty much always have a craving for pickled herring, which my mother still is amazed to report was the food I most asked for as a little girl. (She says she still remembers the expression on my face the first time I tried raw fish at a Japanese restaurant. Something along the lines of “where has THIS been all my life?”) So I frequently have a jar of it in the refrigerator against emergencies. If I’m not making anything too thrilling for dinner, for example, I’ll grate some carrot and mix that with minced parsley and some of the vinegar off the herring, then settle a few fillets on top, and serve the dish as a first course — which manages to dress up the evening.

Also, I had a craving for cornichons, those little French pickles. And I had a big jar of them, next to the herring, somewhere in the back of the frig.

So this is what I did: herring and sour cream and potato salad.

About six red potatoes (I think the waxy ones are best for this dish). Mine were getting a bit past it, so I peeled them, then diced them small. Put them on to steam.

I sliced one shallot thinly and put it in a big salad bowl with a few spoons full of the juice from the pickled herring. Sliced about ten cornichons and two scallions, chopped a spoonful of capers and a big handful of parsley, grated one carrot. Threw them in the bowl. Got a lot of pickled herring fillets –I’d say about six or seven — and sliced them, adding to the bowl. When the potatoes were done, I tipped those, still hot, on top of everything else and tossed it well. Then I added a big dollop of sour cream and a smaller one of Greek yogurt (which tastes like a country cousin of sour cream more than it does like regular yogurt). Tossed again. Eyeballed it, decided it needed more sour cream, so spooned more in. Added salt and pepper. Tasted. Realized I was doing more than just tasting; I was scarfing — which is always a sign to me that the flavors don’t need much more adjustment. Served it on top of beds of lettuce. Alex said happily, “What is IN this?” and expressed a hope we were having it for lunch the next day. Which we did, even though there wasn’t much left. But I just added two more grated carrots, chopped some more parsley and cornichons, a couple of extra herring, mixed in a little more yogurt, and served on top of warmed whole wheat tortillas covered with lettuce greens.

Topped with spoonfuls of more yogurt sprinkled with chives and some of the chervil just starting to sprout in the heat from the garden. It was a whole different experience from the night before, but just as good.

It would have been just as good with sweet gherkins instead of the cornichons, or all sour cream instead of the mix with yogurt, or sour cream and mayonnaise. Red onion instead of the shallot. Hard-boiled eggs, quartered, would have been a great addition. It was just generally good, which I think is something that can be said of potato salads as a group. Which is a nice thing altogether, especially in unexpectedly hot weather.

(And if you’re ever in Holland during raw herring season, when they sell the stuff with raw onions on rolls out of little trucks parked everywhere on the streets, don’t under any circumstances fail to try it. Alex calls it “Dutch sushi,” and it’s one of the most wonderfully robust tastes in the world. Those Dutch. I love them, I love their art, I love their wood paneled bars, I love their herring. In fact, if you can catch a performance of the Rotterdam theater group Hotel Modern after eating a raw herring sandwich, and then go out for a shot of genever, you’ve had one of the best evenings there can be, I think.)

We’ve got an anniversary of sorts coming up, the husband and me, and usually this means either a quiet trip to the beach with the dogs, or dinner at our favorite local restaurant – which, indeed, is one of our favorite restaurants in the world as the chef is a genius, and her husband is a genius with wine. But this time, we’re both feeling more like staying home. Too little cash, too little time, he’s been traveling too much to want to get in a car again…and I just went four hours away and four hours back with our young dog to rescue another dog from an animal shelter where she was unable to find a home. We want to stay with the dogs, too – the new dog is so tentatively thrilled to be here, safe and sound and among friends, that who could bear to lock her up in a car while we eat inside?

So I want to make something festive for dinner, but not something that will involve me in a lot of fuss, and something that will let me settle down in front of one of – we hope – the last fires of the season with my loved ones while it cooks. Normally, this would mean my version of paella. But I don’t really have the time or the money to race around looking for the best seafood and sausage to put into it. That means an arroz, my version of a Spanish rice dish, made with whatever bits and pieces I can find. Bits and pieces in Spanish is ‘pedacitos’. So Arroz con Pedacitos. With aioli, to really dress it up and make it particularly nice.

The guys at my local co-op fish counter know when they see me coming that I’m going to scour the shelves for whatever they’ve got of fish scraps, packaged and sold cheap – I buy them when I see them, and toss ‘em in the freezer against just such a need as this one. So I have a couple of packages of halibut frames, with a good amount of fish still clinging to the nicely gelatinous bones — $1.99 a pound. And I have a yoghurt container full of fish stock, made the last time I put together an arroz. Fish stock – any kind of stock – is easy if you don’t worry yourself too much about it. Just throw what non oily fish scraps and bones, along with shrimp shells (when you eat shrimp, don’t throw out the shells left on the plate, decant them into a plastic bag and freeze them for making stock later), in a saucepan along with a cleaned carrot (or peelings), a stick of celery (or peelings – if you have them), a bit of onion or top of a leek, an unpeeled garlic clove or two, a bay leaf, some peppercorns, and sprigs of parsley and/or thyme. Don’t worry if you don’t have some of this, or if you have other things instead that might make it taste nice – fennel fronds, say, or chard ribs, or a little bit of lemon peel. Just imagine what the combination would taste like and add, then cover with water. Bring to a boil. Simmer for about a half an hour, then take out the fish skeletons and shred what fish there is on the bones into a bowl. Set aside. Put the bones back in the stock and simmer some more, until the liquid tastes nice. At this point, you can freeze it, or keep it simmering to add to the arroz.

Of course, you see, if you have it in the freezer already – and luckily, this time, I do – this is going to be a breeze. Then I just heat it up, add the fish skeletons, cook till the fish on them shreds, take them out, save the fish – and I have that nicely deepened stock. While that’s cooking, I’ll make the aioli. If you make it in the food processor or the blender – one whole fresh egg whipped with some salt, one cup of ½ olive oil, ½ sunflower oil added SLOWLY, then mixed with at least five pureed garlic cloves and a little lemon juice – it takes hardly any time at all. And it’s so delicious, it makes us scrape the plate with our fingers to get the last bit up. We can only do this when it’s just the two of us, which is one reason why eating at home is so delightful. That, and that we can eat in our bathrobes if we feel like it.

Now the arroz. For two people, with enough left over for next day’s lunch:

Get a wide pot or skillet out, one with a good fitting lid. Pour in a little olive oil – Spanish is nicest for this. Heat gently, and sauté a chopped onion until it’s soft. Add a few chopped cloves of garlic (or just one, if you’re not as crazy about garlic as we are) and a minced hot pepper. Cook for awhile on the lowest heat till everything’s soft but not browned, almost melting together. Salt. Then add a teaspoon and a half of pimenton de Vera – Spanish smoked paprika. Stir so it doesn’t scorch. Add a diced tomato or two, and continue cooking on a low heat until the whole thing is like savory jam. While this is going on, soak a couple of pinches of saffron in a little bit of wine. (I use this time to make a salad dressing for our first course, and to set the table.)

Now. Add 1 ½ cups short grain BROWN RICE. Really. Please try it. It tastes divine, really meaty and much more interesting than that upper class white stuff you’ve been using. Yes, I know it takes longer, but so what? That’s just more time to sit with your loved one and a glass of wine, isn’t it? And this is a festival after all.

Stir the rice until it crackles a little. Now add 4 cups of simmering fish stock. Maybe a little more salt at this point – taste. Bring back to a boil, add the wine and saffron, clap the lid on, turn the heat onto the lowest setting, and set the timer for an hour. (You’ll have to check from time to time till you get used to the heat of your own burners. If it’s boiling too quickly, even on the lowest heat, use a flame tamer. That’s what I do, but my burners burn hot. On the other hand, if the rice isn’t tender in an hour, and there’s still liquid, take the lid off, turn the heat up a bit, and watch it till it’s near done, then clap the lid back on, turn the heat down, and let it go another five minutes or so.)

Use the hour to pour yourself and loved one a glass of something, and sit down with a few olives to nibble on. I’ve got a bottle of inexpensive Spanish rose cava all ready to go (Cristalino, in case you can find it near you – a real bargain, so pretty and delicious, it’s a party all by itself, really). We’ll have a glass or two of that, maybe have a wander ‘round the meadow in the dusk with the dogs, and when the timer goes off, I’ll have a look at how the rice is doing. If it’s nearly done, I’ll add the reserved fish bits, and some frozen peas straight from the package for color…maybe a jar of drained artichoke hearts I have sitting in the cupboard; I don’t know, I’ll have to see how I feel…then I’ll let it cook another few minutes until it smells divine. We’ll sit down to a salad while I let the arroz rest a little while off the heat. Then out it comes, spooned in a beautiful bronzed pool onto white plates with a dollop of aioli and lemon wedges on the side. More aioli on the table. And more cava of course.

That’s my idea of a fiesta. Really. (Oh, and for dessert, slices of quince paste, if you can find it, alternating with slices of Monterey Jack cheese. Eat a bit of both in one bite. It sounds weird, but it’s completely creamy and delicious, and the whole is rather more than the parts, you’ll see…)

A rather intense day, which included our little dog biting the chunk out of the ear of a dog he was being introduced to at the pound as a possible pal. True, the other dog started it, but it still was embarrassing, as you can imagine. When we got home, I just wanted to have a glass of red wine and something very easy to cook and easy to eat. Something basic. Something involving Dawn’s eggs and the just out of the oven whole wheat sourdough I bought from the bread truck in the store parking lot before the guy even wheeled the bread in. But I didn’t just want eggs. When I feel a trifle stressed, I always want cheese. Apparently, this is common: we want full fat when we feel down. I don’t know why the full fat I always crave at these times is either really aged cheddar or gorgonzola, but as a neighbor of mine once theorized “That’s because even when you’re stressed, you’re still discriminating about your cheeses.” Nice theory, anyway.

I thought about Welsh Rabbit, but I didn’t want to make anything with beer, and it seemed like too much hoopla. Another parameter: I had these nice asparagus, which I really wanted to eat as salad.

(I’ve discovered that the near perfect dressing for asparagus is white truffle oil, a sprinkling of flaked salt, and a big spritz of lemon juice. You dress the hot spears the minute they come off the stove, and let them sit till you’re ready to eat, occasionally basting them with their own juices. Really fabulous. The white truffle oil, of course, was a gift from a dear friend a Christmas or two ago, and I puzzled over it for some time before realizing that this was the use it was meant for.)

What would go with the asparagus, on the same plate, so the dressing running under whatever it was would add to its taste, rather than making me wonder why everything was so soggy? Using, might I add, a wonderfully aged Tillamook cheddar, eggs, and some sourdough whole wheat bread?

As often happens when I narrow it down like this, I found the answer while browsing in the indexes of cookbooks. (This is my way of winding down after putting the groceries away – I figure out which books are closest to the style of how I feel like eating, then I get my glass of wine, and go sit in my big armchair with a stack of my cookbook picks on the ottoman, reading my way through and considering and discarding various possibilities before I figure out which one is closest to what I want. Then, when I’ve got a little guidance, I begin the fascinating process of modifying it further to the circumstances. I know, I know, it sounds like a daft hobby, but, as I point out to my film mad husband, who knows everything there is to know about spaghetti westerns, my way of relaxing does result in something good to eat.)

This time I found what I wanted in a Deborah Madison cookbook. I go to her, and to Marion Cunningham, when I want something sensible and straightforward and delicious. I can count on them. They both give the strong impression of being just the woman you would want living next door when your husband’s having a midnight heart attack, or your daughter’s about to give premature birth, or a bat’s got into the attic. That’s the way they both read. I trust them.

Anyway, Deborah Madison did not let me down. She had, in her index, something called “Baked Cheese on Toast,” and when I got there, I found it was pretty much what I wanted, except for using Gruyere rather than Cheddar. So big deal, I just substituted, and added a couple of dashes of hot sauce, too.

This was how, for the two of us. Preheat the oven to 400. Lightly beat two eggs, add two cups grated sharp cheddar, and a quarter cup of white wine. Add a dash or two of hot sauce. Spread on four pieces of rather thickly cut bread, whole wheat sourdough for choice. Paprika the top, if you’ve got any paprika handy.

In a pan big enough to hold all the bread flat, melt 2 tablespoons of butter. (I do this by just shoving the pan into the oven as it heats up; by the time I’ve mixed everything else the oven is hot and the butter is melted.) Then swirl in the pan another quarter cup of white wine. Lay the bread in the pan, and bake till the cheese melts, about 12 minutes.

Serve on the same plate with asparagus dressed with white truffle oil and lemon juice. Another wedge of lemon on the side does not come amiss.

Any kind of wine you fancy – I had red, the husband had rose.

No muss, no fuss. And we laughed while we ate, and decided our dog was going to have to be an only dog for a little while longer – at least until they’ve forgotten about his disgraceful behavior at the pound.

(And by the way, I’m starting to change my mind a little about food photography. It would have been good to have a picture of those toasts so you can see how they look when they’re done. Unfortunately, they are exactly the kind of thing that you have to eat RIGHT AWAY lest, upon cooling, the cheese turns to leather, but it’s given me something to think about anyway. I guess this is another example of personal growth…)

Success with the salmon a l’unilateral in the cast iron pan last night. It didn’t stick at all, and the skin was even better than cooked in the nonstick pan – more crispy. So that’s a successful cuisine risk taken. And I’ll never go back to the Teflon pan. The cast iron heats more evenly; I can predict what it’s going to do more easily; and I don’t have to worry about melting chemicals making their way into my food. Just a little leached iron, which I can use more of, anyway.

We had the fish with black rice, which I find you should cook with a little less water than they say on the package (1 2/3 cups of water to 1 cup of rice as opposed to 1 ¾ cups). Then very important to let it sit and steam a bit after it’s finished cooking. I let it sit while I make the salmon and finish up the salad.

As for that salad — the Co-op had the most beautiful watercress, a huge green bouquet of it. So we had a watercress salad. It was a little tougher watercress than the bunch I bought last week; the leaves were a little bigger and stronger flavored. So I figured it would go with a more strongly flavored dressing than the one I usually use (shallots and lemon juice and walnut oil).

I soaked a thinly sliced shallot in some lemon juice with salt for about a half an hour. Then I mashed in a little bit of blue cheese and added a spritz of soy sauce – to make it go better with the wasabi butter planned for the top of the salmon. Then two parts walnut oil to the one part of the lemon juice – for the two of us, I used a teaspoon of lemon juice to two teaspoons of walnut oil. Separated the watercress leaves from the stems; saved the stems for soup later. Used almost the whole bouquet of leaves for our salad, only kept a few out for lunch today. Tossed the leaves with the dressing as the salmon was doing its last minute of cooking, yelled out to my husband who had wandered out to the meadow to take a picture of the moon, and who is apt to forget how testy I get on fish or egg cooking nights if he’s not there ready to light the candles right at the minute the dish comes off the stove, went back and served the salmon half on a mound of black rice, the wasabi butter melting on top, and the whole surrounded by a semicircle of glistening watercress leaves.

It was a really good dinner. And that watercress salad was perfect with the wasabi butter salmon. A fresh hit of peppery greens that we used to dreamily mop up whatever was left on the plate.

(By the way, we drank a Spanish rosado. Which is a rose. i.e. pink wine. Which no one should be snobbish about, it tastes so very, very good. And I’ll tell you the truth: I always know when I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t trust their own tastes, but gets their info from the food magazines, when they lift their eyebrows and say, “you drink ROSE?” Of course, now the food magazines have rapturously discovered it as the new best thing, so probably that response will die down a touch. But if there was one change I could make in the world by waving a magic wand, just one little change, it would be that each and every adult would consult their own tastes about what they want and act on them, instead of expecting some expert to tell them what desires make them superior to the less knowledgeable people around them. If you think about it, that one change would change an awful lot in an awful lot of spheres.)

The Mushroom Man at the Growers’ Market always has something fascinating on his table, and whether it’s because of the mysterious quality of the various fungi, or the fact that I know he’s foraged for all of it in the mountains ringing the valley, or something else entirely, every week I’m absolutely riveted by the display. I spend a lot of time mooning about what I might do with those trompettes des morts, those hedgehog mushrooms, those morels.

This week, I stopped to greet him and eye his wares as usual, and halfway through a sentence my eyes widened. There was a heap of little marble-sized, dirt covered balls, and a sign that said: Oregon truffles. “Not really,” I said. “They won’t be here long,” he said.

Now I’d heard we grew truffles in Oregon, and I’d seen them in the mushroom books, and I’d been more than a little entranced by the general romance of them. I’ve only ever eaten fresh truffles once, in creamy scrambled eggs at La Regalade in the 14^th, in Paris – at which meal I was so overwhelmed by the huge terrine on the table, and the wine the couple at the next door table offered us from their bottle, and the guys on the other side of me tucking into what looked like an entire steer, that I hardly took in a separate truffle flavor. But of course it’s the legend of truffles that’s the important thing. I mean, if you’ve read Colette, or Joseph Wechsberg on the subject, truffles stay with you forever as a kind of fairy tale. A European myth. So the idea that they were here in Oregon, too – there was a certain quiet satisfaction in that. Or, as Thoreau so pertinently said, “I walk not toward Europe, but toward Oregon.”

So I bought one. Of course I bought one. I told the Mushroom Man I was going to cook it in creamy soft scrambled Egg Lady eggs, and he thoroughly approved of that. He told me to hold out my hand, and then he pressed a knuckle and said, “That’s how they feel now.” Then he pressed the skin between my knuckles, and said, “That’s how they feel when they’re ready to eat. They’re ready about 12 days after I’ve picked them. And they don’t wait for you! You eat when the truffle is ready, okay?”

No question, I said. I always eat when the food in question is ready. It’s part of my partnership agreement with the Good Life. He nodded and put the small black thing into a little plastic container and handed it over with a certain solemnity.

The next day I smelled the truffle. It smelled faintly sweet, but nothing very overwhelming, and I put it away again. But two days later, it smelled intensely of…what? Of nothing else I could think of. Something familiar, but nothing I could name. Violet pastilles, I thought, but that wasn’t quite it either. I was a little taken aback by this – I’d somehow imagined something musky, something a little more earthy and less perfumed. Well, it was earthy. But not in the way I’d thought. Not like mushrooms. More like…cheese and hay.

By the next day, the violet smell was even stronger, crossed with a kind of smell of green grass and wet dirt. I felt the truffle thoughtfully and decided I probably had about two more days before it got to where the Mushroom Man said it should. So the next day, I took out a little nailbrush I keep for cleaning mushrooms and scrubbed it and scrubbed it till it looked like a speckled malted milk ball. The smell kept rising up off it, and our little dog licked my hands with special enthusiasm after, even after I washed them. Then I minced half of it up finely and mixed with 5 of Dawn’s eggs and 1 egg yolk, for them to sit and soak up the flavors overnight. I saved the other half of the truffle. Half of that we had grated over that night’s pasta and butter and cheese, and the aroma was definite, though more elusive than I liked. I’d made a mistake by putting a lot of parsley in the sauce, and that made everything too complex; you could almost catch the truffle taste, but then it would fly off in a different direction. With all that parsley in there you couldn’t quite separate the flavor out. So I wouldn’t make that mistake the next night. The next night would be strictly butter and eggs and cream and truffles. As for the remaining quarter of raw truffle, that I planned to grate on the eggs after they were done, to be warmed by their heat alone.

So the next night, with a certain sense of occasion and curiosity, I opened a bottle of rose. Poured out a glass. Got the egg bowl out of the frig. When I lifted the lid, the smell flowered up at me. It was startling, the power of it. And what was in it, I wondered? what was that scent? Violets, for sure – but violets mixed with ripe cheese and hay. That’s about the best way I can describe it. I pondered this briefly, along with the beautiful black and gold marble of the truffled eggs. Then I shook myself, and got down to business. I smeared a lot of butter around the inside of an earthenware cazuela I’d brought back from Spain. I put that on a flame tamer, and, pouring the eggs in, I turned the heat on low.

Meanwhile, I toasted four big pieces of Sammy’s sourdough bread, and kept them warm in the oven. I put a salad ready to be tossed on the table – dressing of lemon, thyme, garlic, walnut oil, blue cheese, with diced avocado and toasted hazelnuts in the bottom of the bowl; salad spoon and fork crisscrossed on top; mesclun leaves heaped on top of those. I stirred the eggs pretty continuously for about twenty minutes, until they were a creamy amalgam – at one point adding a glug of cream to slow the cooking down, and finishing them with a tablespoon or two of butter cut up and stirred till melted, so we’re not talking a spa dinner here — and then I poured them on the bread and grated what was left of the truffle on top.

Alex’s eyes got wide after he took the first bite. “This doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever eaten before,” he said. “What about you?” I laughed, because all of a sudden I was back at La Regalade, and now I knew what that elusive flavor was I’d been too over stimulated at the time to take in then. “Yes,” I said. “Just one other time.”

And we talked about Oregon, and how glad we are to live here, and I had another glass of rose, and the night went quickly, too quickly, which is the way it’s supposed to be with good nights, I guess.

We get good salmon here, which is lucky, given our landlocked status. Somehow we’re on the salmon sales run heading down from Alaska to the markets in California south of us, and since the fish is frozen on the boats just about as quickly as it’s caught, it’s about the freshest we can hope for. Which is not bad at all.

Every year when the Growers’ Market starts up in the spring, we have some nice woman selling frozen salmon under one of the awnings. And I pretty much buy a couple of filets every week that I can. Growers’ Market day is errand day for me generally, and I don’t feel much like fussing over a meal when I get home. (Although as I write this, it occurs to me that I don’t much feel like fussing over a meal generally. I pretty much like a straightforward preparation during the cooking phase followed by sighs of contentment during the eating phase. Fussing doesn’t enter into it.) So Tuesday dinner during salmon season is generally a.) salmon, b.) black rice/quinoa/or whole-wheat couscous with butter and soy sauce added at will at the table c.) appropriate vegetable and d.) salad. Simple, easy, good to eat, good for you. Not particularly inexpensive, but a pretty good deal if you buy the fish from the nice lady selling it out of the cooler on the back of her truck at the Growers’ Market.

One of my favorite ways to cook the filets is a l’unilateral, topping them after with wasabi butter. Translated, this means the fish is cooked on the skin side only, till it’s nice and crispy and brown, and the salmon itself is tenderly underdone. There are a lot of good recipes for this, but I tend to follow the counsel of Patricia Wells here. She recommends painting the skin side with some olive oil to keep it from sticking, then heating on medium heat a nonstick pan. (In my quest to get Teflon out of my kitchen, I mostly use cast iron pans now. But I’m still too chicken when it comes to the salmon. I mean, if it sticks, then all that crispy skin – my favorite part — is lost. I haven’t yet dared risk it. I will someday, though.) Then add a tablespoon or so of butter to the pan, let it foam and subside, put the salmon in skin side down, and cook about 6 minutes or so till the skin is nice and crispy and etc. (I use one of those screen thingies on top of the salmon to keep the grease from sputtering all over the stove.) Then clap a lid on it and let it steam for a minute or two, but NO LONGER, till it looks done to your liking. (This timing is for thawed salmon, though if the fish manages to make it home still frozen, I just use it that way and allow a couple of extra minutes. This makes a very rare salmon, which I happen to think is salmon at its best, but if you like your fish well done, just leave it on the fire longer. Try it my way first, though.) Sprinkle with flaked or coarse salt. Serve with wasabi butter melting on top.

For the wasabi butter: dead simple. If you have a mortar and pestle, do it like I do. Grind some whole peppercorns and salt, then add as much butter as you want, as much wasabi as you want, and a little bit of soy sauce. Mash together till well mixed. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, just mash everything together with a fork in a bowl, and then add freshly ground pepper from the peppermill.

We had this the other night with room temperature asparagus dressed with a soy/ginger/garlic/scallion sauce left over from a tofu dinner the night before. Steamed black rice, which is particularly nice with salmon. Lemon wedges. And after, a salad tossed with a lemon/thyme dressing with a touch of blue cheese smushed in. I don’t know why, but blue cheese – just a little, anyway – always seems to go with soy sauce…and it’s really nice after the wasabi.

As for why we have the salad after…sometimes we have it before, sometimes after. The real deciding factor is whether the main course needs attending to by the cook right up until it demands to be eaten. Since we have that salmon just about the minute it gets off the stove and under the melting wasabi butter, I generally have the salad on the table waiting to be tossed and served out after. (Dressing at the bottom of the bowl, crossed serving implements on top, salad leaves piled on them over the dressing…so the salad doesn’t get all wilted and depressed while we’re eating everything else.) Also, if we’ve just had something that will taste good with the salad scooping what’s left, it’s nice to serve it on the same plates. I like that with the salmon. What’s left of the wasabi butter, and the soy sauce from the asparagus, just mingles with the salad in a harmonious kind of way.

I’ve been thinking a lot – well, more like brooding – about the issue of photographs to go with recipes. A very nice guy named Drew, who has his own food blog and has just published a book “Cook Like Your Grandmother”, sent me a chiding email about my attitude toward these…he essentially said lighten up and get those photographs. People want to see that food. And I could see his point.

So the night before the Husband was supposed to leave on a fairly strenuous and stressful business trip, I’d put extra care into a dinner I knew a.) he would really, really like and b.) would nourish him through the following days of warm white wine, crummy Indian food, and the trail mix he carries in his bag in case of emergencies.

He really likes vegetables, and his favorite dinners are when I make a lot of different little veggie dishes and arrange them appealingly on the plate. This particular night I’d done a good job, if I do say so myself, with the stuff I had in the refrigerator. Sliced potatoes baked in an earthenware casserole with cream and garlic and nutmeg, served on a bed of mesclun lettuce leaves. Asparagus roasted with butter with a wedge of lemon on the side. Roasted beets diced and tossed with walnut oil, lemon juice, and parsley. A big roasted portabella mushroom with garlic and balsamic vinegar. (I threw in a baked apple, too, since the oven was going, and this I had for my solitary breakfast the next day.)

Now the advantages of this dinner are obvious. If you get the timings right, all you have to do once everything’s ready for the oven is pop each dish in at the right time. So while it all cooks gently, you can sit and have a glass of something and talk with your loved one.

That’s first.

Then second, like I said, it all looked terrific on the plate. I just about always use plain white plates for just this reason. I like food to look like food, not like little architectural nightmares, and I like the plates to help it look as much like itself as possible. White is the best for this, in my experience.

So when we came to the table, the plates really looked lovely. The white and gold of the potatoes and cream, the dark burnished green of the asparagus, the bright yellow of the lemon wedge, the ruby colored beets, and the mahogany mushrooms.

And Alex said, “Want me to take a picture?”

“Oh, sure, thanks,” I said in an unhappy sort of way. So he took the pictures and showed them to me, and they didn’t look anything like the way the table looked and felt to me just then. Though they were fine pictures. I mean, he’s a very good photographer. That wasn’t the problem.

When we sat down to eat, we talked about why I wasn’t happy with the picture taking. “I think,” I said, “that it’s because what I’m trying to do in writing about the food that we eat isn’t to give recipes, or tell someone else how to cook.”

“What is it then?”

“I think…” I said thoughtfully, nibbling on the end of a roasted asparagus, “I think I’m trying to support the idea that everyone should cook and eat what they have and what they like, and that the only thing they need to remember when they do is that, just like in everything else, you have to pay attention. And how on earth can you pay attention to what it is you feel like eating and feel like cooking if there’s some picture there telling you what it all should be? How do I tell someone how to recreate this dinner: which was made with concern that you won’t be eating anything pleasant with anyone pleasant for the next few days, and with a certain amount of anxious love and hope that it’ll nourish you through the next couple of days? Why would anyone want to make that dinner, anyway? They’ll have their own reasons for making dinner, and their own ingredients, and their own likes and dislikes. I don’t see why I should pin our dinner down as if all that wasn’t true. What this dinner is about is this moment in time. How could it be anything else?”

“Oh,” he said laughing. “Well, if THAT’S it, of course you don’t want photographs. I don’t know how I’d be able to photograph that.”

And then he gave another laugh. I asked what was funny, and he said, “I was just thinking that the photographs would look much better if I had time to light the food right. And I had this picture in my head of your expression if dinner was all ready and waiting to be eaten, and I had to set up lights to get the perfect shot.”

I laughed at that, too. Because a choice between the perfect, immortal picture of my cuisine, and just sitting down to another ephemeral, good tasting dinner when it’s hot and ready to eat? Not even a choice at all. And I can’t help thinking that anyone who would choose immortality over the pleasures involved in small everyday happiness is some kind of fool. And that unfortunately it seems to be the fools who have their say generally. Maybe because the rest of us are all at home having a nice meal. At least, I am, and I hope you are, too.

(Roasting different vegetables in the same oven, by the way, is a terrific technique for pleasing your dinner guests while keeping your brow relatively serene and your temper relatively unfrazzled. No matter what you read about the temperatures needed for the different dishes, all you really have to do is be sensible about choosing one temp, and then adjust the times accordingly. One really, really, really easy way to make a great dinner this way is to cut up an assortment of vegetables or leave them whole, depending on their size – chunked carrots and potatoes and celery, whole mushrooms, whole garlic cloves, whole shallots, halved tomatoes, halved fennel bulbs, etc., you get the idea — coat them in a little oil, strew some thyme branches around them, salt and pepper, cover with foil, and bake until they’re all a little browned around the edges and tender and smell great. Say, 375 degrees for an hour or so. Serve with a garlic mayonnaise and a salad, and something chocolaty for dessert. Never fails to please.)

I wanted to make a brandade of salt cod and potato for dinner – Easter dinner, in fact. The classic accompaniment is salad, and I was out of greens. What else would go? We’re half an hour from the nearest market, and I loathe just popping into a market for one or two things even in the best of circumstances, so there was nothing for it but to figure out another way forward. Fortunately, this kind of challenge always gets me going. And I wasn’t going to give up on the brandade. It was a holiday, after all, and I’d bought a terrific low cost bottle of Spanish rose sparkling wine, perfect with the brandade…I just needed a damn salad.

Now the market problem had given me not just one, but two bunches of beautiful parsley – one curly, one Italian flat – in the frig. This was the result of the husband’s buying what he thought was one parsley, one cilantro. Being a happy wife, I didn’t mention it to him, just complimented him on the general beauty of the herbs (vibrant green leaves, nice juicy stems), and gave some serious thought as to how to use all that parsley.

It turns out it makes a terrific salad. And just the thing for brandade. If you like garlic, you can garlic up both of them as much as you want; if you don’t, don’t. They’re both still good without it. Though in my opinion, nothing is as good without garlic as it would have been with.

Here’s how: I used James Beard’s recipe as a guideline, but I’m not convinced you really have to finely mince the garlic and let it sit in the dressing for two hours, the way he suggests. If you do it my way, you don’t have to think so far ahead. Mash a clove of garlic into one part vinegar, salt and pepper, add three parts oil. The usual vinaigrette, in fact. He’s right that sherry vinegar tastes terrific with parsley, and since it tastes terrific with brandade, too, it was the choice for that dinner. (And extra bonus, it looked terrific on the plate. In fact, the whole dinner looked terrific…the gold white of the brandade curling around the jade green parsley, and the rose colored wine on the side…)

To make the salad, just strip the parsley leaves off their stems. I used two-thirds curly parsley to about one third flat, but the next day for lunch I used all curly to great effect…and in a way, I think that second salad was even better. That time I sliced a shallot very thinly and let it sit in one part raspberry vinegar (salt and pepper, too) for about an hour. This really is important – the shallot tastes much sweeter after the soak; you can taste the difference yourself if you try it both ways. Then I added three parts light walnut oil. I used this salad as a topping for some beans I’d experimented with…using bouillabaisse seasoning for a vegetarian version of baked beans…they were okay, but not really worth passing the recipe around. But with the parsley salad lumped on top of them and a warmed whole-wheat tortilla, they made a very passable lunch indeed.

And by the way, if you make this, don’t throw away the stems. Just tie them together and use them to flavor a soup or a broth or a stew or…I chop them up and put them in my dogs’ food, myself.

…and an eccentric dinner for one

When my vegetarian husband goes away, I tend to experiment with bits and pieces of the cheaper kinds of meat. Mind, by cheaper I don’t mean the meat from torture animals, at 39 cents a pound, but the kinder cuts that, for whatever reason, nobody else seems to want that day. Those are the ones that get my imagination going. The bargain and the challenge – and also those cuts tend to be the most flavorful. Center cut beef shank for a one person pot au feu. Duck gizzards and livers for a warm salad. Marrow for spreading on garlic rubbed toast, and layered with cornichons and flaked Maldon salt. Rabbit saddle roasted with a little thyme and olive oil. That kind of thing.

So when I saw a package of “pork riblets” at the Co-op marked “special today” – 75 cents for about a third of a pound – I grabbed them and tossed them into the freezer against the next time I’d have a solitary dinner and some time to think about what to do with them.

This is what I did: I chunked some shallots (this could have been onions, but I’d found cheap shallots at one market and loaded up), peeled some whole garlic cloves, chunked a couple of carrots and a stalk of celery or two. Preheated my little toaster oven to 350 degrees. Tossed the vegetables in a big bowl with the riblets cut up into smaller pieces, along with a very little bit of olive oil (the fat from the ribs was going to be enough lubrication, I reckoned, this was just to get things started), salt, ground pepper, a teaspoon of sweet smoked Spanish paprika, and a little of the Aleppo red pepper a friend had excitingly given me as a New Year’s gift. When everything was nice and coated, I poured it into an earthenware dish and shoved it in the oven. No need to defrost the riblets. Just cook them a little extra time if they’re still frozen.

About forty five minutes later, the house smelled heavenly. (Of course, you have to really like pork products to be into this version of heaven.) I went and peered at the dish, tossed everything around to coat it all with the rendered juices from the riblets, and turned up the temperature to 400 to brown everything nicely.

Now I poured myself a glass of white wine and spread some mesclun leaves on a plate. (I’ve recently noticed my market calls these leaves “spring mix.” Whatever the name, they’re very handy to have around.) I quartered a lemon and put a wedge next to the leaves. When the ribs and vegetables were nice and browned, I piled them on the lettuce and sat down and had at it.

Gnawing on the bones is the best part, but the rest of it was satisfying, too. Light. I could have chunked potatoes in it as well, and would have if I’d had company. Then I would have used a bigger pan, obviously, and the big oven, and more vegetables, and more ribs – even the thick country style ones would have worked with this. Any variation, as long as it included pork ribs and vegetables and Spanish paprika and a nice long bake in the oven that gives you time to sit, put your feet up, and think about your day…