I know we weren’t but we should have been, okay?
I was in the market the other day, and there was this adorable little net bag of tiny, multicolored potatoes, roughly the size of marbles. Since Alex’s ur-food is potatoes, I knew these would thrill him, and indeed, when I brought them out last night as a dinner possibility, I could see the warmth in his eyes.
How did he want them cooked? I gave him choices, but he, in his English wisdom, chose the simplest way, the classic one, boiled till tender, then tossed in melted butter and chopped parsley. As so often happens, in my opinion, the simplest is the best. So I was happy about that.
“How many of them do you want?” I asked. He eyed the net bag hungrily. “Why don’t you just cook all of them?” he finally said. “I know anything left over you’ll turn into something great for lunch tomorrow.”
So it was. I cooked them till tender. “How long will that take?” Teri, our friend, asked as she watched this exchange with interest. “Who knows?” I said. “I’ve never cooked potatoes this tiny. I’ll just have to taste.” As it turned out, ‘tender’ was about five minutes of boiling in. Then I drained them, and right before we went to table, I tossed in some butter, salt, pepper, and a load of chopped parsley, heating it all together. We had them with a few smoked sardines on the side, a rocket and shredded carrot salad, and green beans topped, parboiled, drained, refreshed in cold water, drained again, and tossed at the last minute as the potatoes with some butter, salt, and a couple of squeezes of Meyer lemon.
It was a very nice dinner. But it was the leftovers I liked even more.
Next day, peering into the fridge at lunchtime, I noted we had half an onion lying there about to dry out, a bag of mesclun lettuce that was about two days past being able to use as a salad, and a half a jalapeno chile that must have been too big to use whole. This made me think (of course it did!) potato hash. Preferably wrapped in tortillas—corn for me, as per my preference, and whole wheat for Alex.
So I wrapped those tortillas in foil, and stuck them in the toaster oven to warm. I sliced the half onion, chopped up the leftover potatoes, deseeded the jalapeno, slicing it thinly, and minced a couple of garlic cloves. All that went into a wide skillet where some mild olive oil sizzled, while I chopped up the half bag of mesclun and had a look in the fridge in case I missed anything I could use.
Back to the stove where I stirred vigorously.
In the fridge, I found some cleaned cilantro. That made me reach for the cheddar cheese and the sour cream. I chopped the cilantro, shredded a little of the cheese, and returned to the hash, turning up the heat, and tossing it all until the onions and potatoes were a bit browned. The tortillas were ready, so they went on plates with a slice of lemon on the side. I had one little slice of lime left, so I squeezed that over the hash and turned off the heat, leaving the skillet on the burner so when I tossed the mesclun and the chopped cilantro in, the leftover heat softened and tamed them a bit.
I topped the tortillas with the hash, sprinkled them both with grated cheddar, and added a dollop of sour cream just for laughs.
Alex looked at it as he came to table and smiled. As he ate, he looked up and said, “This is even better than the potatoes were last night.” Which is just what you want to hear about leftovers, so I count that one a win.
[Postscript: In this post, as always in my Jam Today reveries, I see all my themes of loving to eat, of hating waste, and of cooking on the fly to satisfy both those needs at once. I was going to bring out a third Jam Today book next year, “Jam Today Returns: A Confidante in the Kitchen,” and this was part of my writing as I plowed forward with the manuscript. But something kept nagging at me. What I was writing wasn’t my best work, oh well, I’ll fix it later. But when you think that day after writing day, after awhile, you realize something is wrong. Something is stopping the book from being what the book should be.
I took a break from the manuscript and pondered. While I was pondering, I read, as I do before dinner, my many issues from my many subscriptions of my many food magazines. And it dawned: every one of them was now serving up the same way of cooking and eating that I did in the first Jam Today book, back in 2009. When I got an alert from the New York Times that said, “Twenty four ways to cook without recipes!” I finally got it. Laughing, I muttered to myself, “My work here is done.” Because why was I going to write another book about the same kind of cooking that now was, thankfully, the fashion? Who needed it?
I’ve canceled that book for now. What I am sort of slyly planning is to come back to it, circling from another direction. I’d like to do a memoir of how I learned to be a cook. Really, I think of my nieces and nephews, and I think of all the bits and pieces of cooking lore, cooking hacks I could pass on to them, and I think: That’ll be the book I write.
I figure I’ll wait, patiently stalking it, till it interests me again, which interest generally only comes to me when I’m heading out into untamed territory. And my only hope of interesting you is if I’m interested first myself in what direction I’m headed in. When I find what direction that is, when my compass points me right, we’ll see where I am and if it has anything of interest to say.]