I firmly believe that everyone has a home, a place where they feel they belong—and if they don’t have such a place, they should, they need one. Where I feel at home won’t be the same as where you do, nor should it. Just think how crowded if we all felt the same way! Having a home that you know and love is just about the best thing a human being can earn, after a partner and a family and some kind of work that brings out the best in you.
So when I count my blessings, I start (after my partner and my family and my work that I find absorbing day after day) with my home. I’ve lived in many different places over the years, many different countries, many different towns, many different kinds of places…but home has stayed the same for a good long part of my life. And that is the Pacific Northwest, or as some of us fondly refer to it, Cascadia.
When I came home this time, after years of commuting back and forth hundreds of miles to an undeniably lovely and hospitable spot whose only defect was that it wasn’t home, I felt as if my feet were more firmly on the ground than they’d been in years. I could breathe again. I could hear stories of new possibilities in the wind through the trees. (That last is no hyperbole by the way, just simple fact. Try it, next time you find yourself alone in a wood.) I set out, delighted, to reconnect with my neighbors. And to connect with neighbors I had yet to meet.
One of these connections which I delightedly made was with the food editor of our local newspaper, the Medford Mail Tribune. I’d idly read her posts on and off from far away, and thought with a touch of homesickness, of how she was foraging in my home markets. I noticed when she foraged, she found similar opportunities to the ones I would have seized upon myself. Her recipes, in short, showed we had a lot in common.
This had happened a few times before. When Gourmet magazine was still going, I used to clip a recipe or two out of every issue. One day I noticed that every single recipe I clipped—every single one—was by the same food editor. So I sent her a copy of Jam Today, and now, you know, we are very good friends. We meet up every time I’m in New York, and indulge together in a mutual love of garlic laden Chinese food. We never stop talking the whole time. Mostly about food. But about a lot of other, related, things as well. Because the people I have the most in common with know that food is just one of the ways, albeit one of the most important ways, that we have of expressing the fact that we are human. And that we are human together.
Remembering this, I sent the food editor of the Mail Tribune a copy of Jam Today Too. And sure enough, it turns out we do have shared food values—and maybe even more. For example, take frittata. Anyone who knows me, knows I love a good egg dish. They’re all over the Jam Today series, all over. And honestly, I thought I knew every single egg dish there was on offer. But here, today (June 22), in this blog post by Sarah Lemon (and if that isn’t a great name for a food editor, I don’t know what is), is an egg dish I have not only never heard of but am dying to try. How often does that happen, I ask you.
Mashed potatoes, herbs, and eggs. ‘Fresh Herb Kuku’ it’s called. Yes, indeed, I am going to make this one pronto. And if I’m going to gild the lily (which I suspect I am), I may add a bowl of garlic mayonnaise, aka aioli, to the table to be dipped into at will and used to anoint said frittata. I think that would be very nice indeed. And then maybe I’ll use a trick I discovered about how to easily make a salad on the side. I’ve mentioned this in both the Jam Todays, I think. First you make your garlic mayonnaise in a food processor, then scrape it out into a bowl. But wait! There’s still lots of the unctuous stuff clinging to the sides of the processor bowl, not to mention the blades. Don’t worry, there will be no waste (and there probably wouldn’t be if you have someone in house who wants to lick the bowl, either…but that is a slightly more dangerous option, those food processor blades being sharp as they are).
What I used to religiously do was add chunks of cabbage to the bowl, and then process. It turned out there was just enough aioli clinging to the sides to mix with the cabbage to make a fresh tasting salad for the side of whatever else I had going.
Then the other night, I made an aioli to go with a Spanish style rice dish. But no cabbage in sight—it had all gone into a tuna salad the night before. I was just going to make a green salad, when, looking in the vegetable drawer, I had a mild brain wave. Why not make this salad with carrots? So I peeled some, chunked them up, threw them in, and processed.
It tasted fine, but it looked a little pallid. I wanted something green in there. That was when I remembered I had a huge bag of sorrel, which grows like a weed in the Indigo Ray’s garden, and which no one around here but Indigo and I ever pick (can’t imagine why, it makes fantastic lemony tasting soup). So I threw some of that in and pulsed. Beautiful orange and green flecked salad resulted. And the taste! My! Lemony and garlicky and sweet and fresh all at once.
I highly recommend it. In fact, I would recommend you seek out some sorrel to make just this dish. And if there’s anything I think it would go superbly well beside, well, it would have to be the Fresh Herb Kuku that Sarah Lemon so wonderfully revealed to me today.
It’s good to be home. Yes, indeed.