There is a Best Way to cook small artichokes, those little ones you can sometimes find in spring, the first ones of the season—small fat balls with purple spiky tips. Usually, I pounce on these when I see them, and make a spring stew of their trimmed hearts with whatever other baby vegetables I can find: carrots, turnips, peas, lettuce, new garlic.
But one year, the baby artichokes appeared before I could find the other newborns. It was still too early for that. And I wanted to make a warm salad of oyster mushrooms and baby kale leaves to start, followed by baked potatoes and half avocados with lemon and olive oil. So I needed to cook the artichokes some way to fit with that. I figured they’d be really good with the baked potatoes on the side, and then I found a recipe in an old cookbook—Janet Ross’s Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen. She said it was the best way to cook baby artichokes, and it turns out, she was right.
Here’s how:
Trim the artichokes. This is easier than it sounds. First have a bowl of water waiting. Start with one artichoke. Snap off the obviously tough outer leaves. Then, using a stainless steel or ceramic knife (carbon steel blackens artichokes for some reason), cut off the top half of the remaining leaves, down to the tender light green. Trim off any rough or black bits. Cut in quarters and toss them into the bowl of water to keep them from turning black in the air. Do this to all the artichokes.
Then, drain them, and put them in a skillet that will hold them all in a single layer. Cover with boiling water. Add a few crushed peppercorns (Ross recommends one for each artichoke), some salt, and one tablespoon olive oil for each two artichokes. Boil until the water’s gone. Then add as much fresh lemon as you like—she says squeeze one for every twelve artichokes; I just spritzed on a bunch. Chopped parsley, if you like.
Easy. Good hot, good warm, good cold. My idea of a good dish all round.
Also suavely delicious and the perfect thing to serve with baked potatoes and a little white wine on the first spring night that’s warm enough to do without a fire.
Sometimes too much food is just enough: at a feast, for example . . . at a wedding, or a christening, or a birthday, in fact. But sometimes too much food is just too much food, whether it’s a bad habit, a lack of thought, or a terror of trying something new. (I think of this last whenever I see parents horrified at the idea of having a meal without ‘protein’. Why can’t you have a meal without protein? We in the States eat way too much of it; you’re not going to starve your children without feeding them chicken three times a day, that’s for sure.)
It’s nice to think of an elegant way to have just enough. I like to do that, and then to eat it slowly, and think about how much tastier it is than all the unenjoyed rubbish I put into my mouth without thinking, at times when I don’t give myself time to think.
When I do give myself enough time, though, I come up with things like nori wraps for lunch.
This is easy.
First you have leftover rice. Any kind. Brown rice, white rice, long grain, short grain. I like black Forbidden Rice, which I’ve often got in a bowl in the fridge because we had it with fish the night before.
Then you add diced vegetables. Whatever you’ve got. Cucumber’s great. Scallion’s nice. Radishes add color. Once I added, of all things, two parboiled sliced okra, because Alex’s okra plant in the garden had produced exactly that amount. And to even it out, I added a few green beans, parboiled with the okra.
I like to add seaweed. You can use soaked wakame. Crunchy sea palm fronds. Or hijiki, just a tablespoon, soaked for 30 minutes, then tossed over high heat with soy sauce and a little sugar.
After you’ve got all that together, toss the whole thing with some rice vinegar—about a tablespoon for each cup of rice—and about the same amount of soy sauce. Taste and see what you like.
I spoon it out on two plates, sprinkle the whole lot with sesame seeds, add an umeboshi plum for me (Alex doesn’t like them), and, on a separate plate, some fresh fruit for dessert. Fresh plums are nice.
On the table, a stack of sheets of toasted nori, some wasabi paste, and soy sauce.
Each diner mixes a little soy with a little wasabi, wraps some of the rice salad in the nori, and desultorily dips the wrap in the soy mixture, eating reflectively.
When you’re finished, a light kiss bestowed on your loved one before moving on to the work of the afternoon is always nice . . .
Then there was that summer where it must have been about 110 degrees all week.
One of those mornings, I made noodles to have cold, Japanese style, with a sauce . . . and I made a wakame seaweed/cucumber salad, all nice and chilled in a blue bowl.
That was going to be dinner.
During the day, the temperature dropped. Neither of us felt like a cold meal anymore. So I shrugged and we had veggies from the garden and bread and cheese for dinner instead.
The temperature kept dropping. The idea of those noodles, with the sky clouded over and the rain clearing the air, seemed even less alluring the next day than it had the night before. But there they were cluttering up the refrigerator. And, plus . . . I had a craving for that seaweed/cucumber salad. I always have a craving for that seaweed/cucumber salad, come to think of it. I don’t know why.
So this is what I did for lunch: I mixed half the noodles with the salad and served it cold. Cherries for dessert.
And here’s how you make the noodle salad (the seaweed/cucumber part from a recipe in Elizabeth Andoh’s At Home with Japanese Cooking):
In a little saucepan, mix 4 tablespoons rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons soy sauce, and 2 teaspoons sugar. Heat it until the sugar melts. Then pour in a salad bowl and chill.
Soak one ounce of wakame seaweed in warm water for about a half hour, till it gets all huge and seaweedy. Drain. Pat dry.
Meantime, peel and halve a cucumber. Scrape out the seeds. Slice thinly. Sprinkle with a little salt and let sit for a bit. Squeeze out the liquid.
Toss the seaweed and cucumber in the salad bowl with the dressing. Chill.
Mix with a quarter pound cooked capellini. You can either use cooked and chilled noodles, or cook them fresh and refresh them with cold water. Drain and mix with the salad.
Very tasty. And, come to think of it, completely fat free. Not that you’d notice while you’re eating it.
Serves two. For four, just double the amount of noodles. You’ll have less seaweed and cucumber per person, but I’m willing to bet no one cares. If it seems a little dry, add a bit more soy sauce and rice vinegar. Not too much more, though.
The day after, I stir fried the other half of the noodles with some garden peas and onion and yellow squash and mushrooms, topped it with a little oyster sauce, and served it for lunch. It was still raining, and even though it was July, it felt like fall . . .
That autumn came with a bit of early winter sprinkled in, and it was so beautiful outside in the woods that I found it impossible to break away and go to town to buy groceries. So I stayed in the mountains until the last possible moment (i.e. when we were just about out of anything fresh and edible). Since the frosts came unimaginably early that year, the garden had pretty much folded up. But that’s when things get interesting. I love figuring out what to do with the odds and ends that are left. It’s the kind of creative activity that works the top part of your brain in a pleasant way while leaving the deeper parts free to wrestle with their own problems.
I’d been cooking some pretty eccentric things right around that time of year: eggs scrambled with white wine and garlic and tarragon served on whole wheat tortillas, with leftover salt cod and cream and potato gratin warmed up, and tomato salad on the side, for example. The aforementioned salt cod and cream and potato gratin, with baked tomatoes and braised kale from the garden; baked pears and honey for dessert. (That was a particular favorite—and a particular triumph, seeing as how it was an empty larder dinner, AND WE HAD GUESTS.) Or, kippered herrings, and a small sorrel frittata with fresh tomato sauce, and thinly sliced potatoes sautéed with garlic and onions and chilies in olive oil. I mean, you can tell these are Living Half an Hour from the Nearest Market and Too Wrapped Up at Home to Get Out Much meals.
Here’s the best one we had: bucatini with sage and garlic, alongside a chopped parsley, celery leaf, tarragon, tomato, and avocado salad.
Easy. And the salad was really just figuring out if I could mix some ingredients I had just to keep from getting utterly bored with tomato salads (we had a lot of tomatoes that year; you can probably tell from the above). Alex had grown a lot of celery under the impression that they were parsley plants, and I don’t know about other people’s celery, but this type had a very skinny tough stem that was best for flavoring soups . . . and LOTS of leaves. So I chopped up about a bunch of parsley and a handful of celery leaves with a couple of sprigs of tarragon, and at the last minute, added a diced tomato and a diced avocado. Tossed with a mustard garlic vinaigrette (crushed clove of garlic, a bit of Dijon mustard, 1 part red wine vinegar to 3 parts olive oil, salt and pepper).
That kind of salad is really good arranged in a crescent on a plate covered otherwise by some kind of simple pasta dish . . . The vinaigrette kind of slooshes under the noodles and adds another dimension which can be very satisfying, especially if you have a glass of wine, too.
And that bucatini and sage was about the simplest thing you can imagine, and really terrific—if you like sage, which we do. (Bucatini is a long spaghetti-like pasta with a hole in its middle, and honestly if I was on a desert island and only allowed one pasta shape, that’s the one I’d pick, even though I have a friend who once spent a sleepless night worrying about my choice after I’d told him so. He would choose farfalle—bowties—which I personally find depressing. So there’s no accounting for tastes; you’ll have your own, too.)
I slivered about twelve sage leaves (I told you we liked sage) and chopped four garlic cloves (we really like garlic, too), and while the pasta was cooking, heated it all in four tablespoons of butter till everything was just beginning to brown and sizzle. Then I tossed it with the cooked pasta and a bit of grated Romano and Parmesan. Served it with a bowl of more grated cheese at the table. Alex had beer. I had red wine.
I love eating alone in the fall. It’s a time when I can really pay attention to all the changes happening all around me . . .
So . . . there was this one fall night. There were tomatoes everywhere in the garden, and little bits of different kinds of cheese left over from a weekend feeding guests. The air was crisp and cold, and I felt the need for something creamy and carbohydratey. Also, I had my usual craving for sage.
I had whole wheat penne mixed with melted butter and shredded sage, then with all the little bits of cheese . . . in this case, the end of a piece of Morbier (full fat and creamy), some domestic Gorgonzola, a tiny piece of goat cheese, what was left of the Parmesan, and a few crumbles of Salem Blue.
Also, I’d sliced a tomato, salted it, and covered it with shredded rocket from the garden, then spritzed a lemon all over, and left it to marinate while I made the pasta. I had the pasta in a bowl and ended up pouring the tomato and rocket ON TOP, which made a kind of dual temperature, decadent carbo fest, but cut by the lemon. And then, oh, I was ready to wrestle with the world once again. I always lose—when I wrestle with the world, I mean. But somehow, when I do the exercise, I don’t feel I’m wasting my time.
Then last night . . . with my vegetarian husband gone, and some local farmed boneless pork ribs on sale . . . I made big chunks of carnitas . . . just cut up the ribs in cubes, tossed them with garlic salt, and roasted them at 300° for about an hour and a half. I had these on top of shredded lettuce, with fresh salsa made from the garden. I had meant to save some for lunch, but, you know, never in history have I saved some carnitas for lunch, no matter how many I make. And so it was with this batch. It took me a half an hour to get through them, with all the going back to the stove and taking JUST TWO MORE PIECES, and it was a lovely experience all around.
Just to make sure I didn’t waste the heat in the oven, too, I pushed in six whole apples from Indigo’s orchard, set in an earthenware dish, topped with a little crystal sugar, and a little apple juice poured around. I had three of them for breakfast this morning, reheated, and then covered with a little cream . . .
I love fall. I really do.
When it turns cold, one’s thoughts turn naturally to polenta. At least, that’s where my thoughts turn. Polenta (aka cornmeal mush), which sits forgotten over the warmer months, glowing gold in the grain/nut/chocolate chip drawer of my refrigerator. At the end of the summer, I start to get restless with the omelets and salads and easier dishes of the long days. The temperature drops, and I suddenly remember: Polenta and tomatoes and cheese. With a celery and aioli salad. And a glass of red wine. I remember how nice it is to sit in front of the fire while the casserole does its final cooking in the oven.
Mostly I remember how forgiving a dish it is: it’ll take just about any kind of eccentric treatment, as long as you keep to a few simple rules.
You cook the polenta. You scoop the top layer off. You fill the middle with anything you like. You put the top layer back on. You cover the top layer with tomatoes, diced or sliced, or tomato sauce, flavored any way you like. Then cheese. Then dribble with oil. Back into the oven for, oh, I don’t know, fifteen to thirty minutes at 350°. It has to be hot through, and smell good, but it can’t have cooked so long that the cheese turns to leather (although to tell the truth, even if it has cooked that long it still tastes great).
The different steps can be as simple or difficult as I feel like making things for myself. There are all these polenta recipes which amusingly make the process as complicated as a specialty of the haute cuisine: you stir it forever with a spoon made of a certain kind of wood, always in the same direction, adding only a touch of Brittany sea salt at the exact moment the moon rises up over the horizon. Something like that.
Or—I recommend this unless you are a masochistic perfectionist with a lot of time on your hands—you can do it the somewhat slapdash way I adapt freely from a great recipe found in Paula Wolfert. The two methods taste absolutely the same, take my word for it.
Here’s the easy way for about four servings (or three healthy servings with only the celery on the side, or—this is how it ends up in our house—two healthy dinner servings and two more moderate lunch servings reheated the next day): One cup of polenta mixed in a shallow baking dish with five cups of water, some salt, and a tablespoon of butter. Bake at 350° for about an hour, till kitchen smells heavenly of corn. Correct the seasoning. Give it another stir, leave it in another five minutes or so, or until it’s the consistency you like. For a casserole, you want a kind of medium body—not so liquid it’s drippy, but not so firm that it’s better for cutting into slices and frying, either.
When it’s done the way you want it, take it out of the oven, and scrape a layer off the top onto a plate. Fill the inside with a compromise between what you like and what you have . . . or rather, not a compromise, a happy marriage. Sautéed mushrooms. Sautéed onions. Sautéed mushrooms AND onions. Chopped olives. Steamed greens. Fried bacon bits. Anchovies from a can. Etc. (You get the idea.) You can put some tomato sauce on top of this layer if you like. Also some cheese is good.
Spread the scraped off polenta back on top. Then either scatter diced tomato, or overlap tomato slices, or cover with your own (or from a jar, or from a can) tomato sauce. Grated cheese over all. Dribble with olive oil. Then pop in the oven for it all to melt and meld together.
Serve with a salad and a glass of wine. If you’ve thought about it before, and you have them on hand, some apples or pears baked in their own dish, alongside the polenta, are nice for dessert, either with or without cream, or even ice cream.
The other night I had a skeptical look in the refrigerator and the cupboard, and assembled the possible odds and ends on the counter. This is what finally made its way into the polenta:
First, I minced a couple of cloves of garlic and a branch of sage from the garden, fried them in a tablespoon of butter, and added the whole thing to the polenta halfway through its hour long cooking time.
Then, to fill the layers, I sautéed a couple of onions in olive oil and tossed THEM with some chopped sage. I spread this on the bottom layer of the polenta, then crisscrossed a can’s worth of anchovies on top. I had a little nubbin of blue cheese left that wasn’t doing anything, so I crushed that into bits and scattered it. Then, thinking the whole thing was too simple, I rooted around in the cupboard and found a jar of artichoke hearts left over from who knows when. These got drained and added to the layer. Then I put the top of the polenta back on. We had a pile of late garden Roma tomatoes, so I diced them, tossed THEM with a little chopped sage, scattered them on top of the polenta, and covered the whole thing with some fresh grated Parmesan and Romano cheese. Dribbled the oil from the anchovies on top.
Baked till bubbling. I like the top browned, so I stuck the casserole under the broiler briefly till it was. Then, because I had some garlic mayo in the fridge, I tossed that with some thin sliced celery for our salad.
Red wine alongside.
We knew it was fall, all right. That was nice.
(If you don’t like sage—lots of people don’t—rosemary would be even nicer. And thyme is always swell, no matter what the time of year . . .)
(Also, you can double the amount of polenta easily—just double the water and butter/oil and salt, and bake for about 30 minutes longer. Very pleasant way to feed a crowd, especially with Italian sausages cooked in the tomato sauce arranged on top.)
It happens once in awhile that I open a bottle of red wine and find I don’t like it all that much. This comes from, a.) my ever-hopeful belief that I will find an inexpensive killer bottle of wine with which to gladden my evenings, and b.) the kindness of friends who tried to find that inexpensive killer bottle of wine to bring over as a gift. Anyway, when it does happen, I don’t repine, and don’t drink it just to not waste it, either. Instead, I make vegetable stew. This really gladdens my husband’s heart, and makes him sigh with the kind of contented sigh that gladdens a wife’s heart.
Especially when I make it with dumplings on top.
So this time, a bottle of Cabernet proved too undistinguished to waste on my precious one glass an evening when not on holiday ration, and I had a lot of aging mushrooms in my refrigerator (they don’t spoil if you don’t put them in plastic, but store them in a paper sack, or better yet, loose in a paper sack-lined refrigerator veggie bin—they just get more and more mushroomy tasting and eventually dry themselves . . . perfect for stew). Also a bunch of tomatoes that never quite ripened from the summer garden, wrapped in newspaper in vain hopes that they would—they just kind of dried out halfway to sweet, which made them a very good accent for vegetable stew.
This is what you do for four people (for two people, just make half the dumpling recipe, and have the rest of the stew for lunch later in the week . . . it’s even better once it’s sat awhile):
First make the base for the stew:
Mince an onion. Two garlic cloves. A diced carrot. A diced celery stalk. The stems of ½ pound of mushrooms chopped. Stew these in a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil, with a tablespoon of curry powder in a large soup pot with a good tight fitting lid (you need this for the dumplings later).
When this has cooked and smells fragrant—only a matter of ten minutes or so—dump a half bottle of red wine and the same amount of water into the pot. (This is easy to measure, since you just fill the bottle with water to the same spot where the wine was. And that way, you’re halfway to rinsing the bottle for recycling.)
Add:
4 potatoes, peeled and chunked. 4 turnips, the same.
4 carrots, the same. (Or a bunch of little carrots, as many as four people would eat.)
4 celery stalks, cut up.
½ pound of mushroom caps thickly cut.
A few peeled whole garlic cloves (or, if they have that little green sprout in the middle, cut in half and sprout removed).
2 or more tomatoes diced. Or a few canned tomatoes and a little of their puree. Or both, come to think of it. (I’ve added dried tomatoes before, and tomato paste—really the main point is to get a tomato accent in there somehow . . .)
Minced stalks of a handful of parsley (mince the leaves to sprinkle on top after).
A bay leaf.
A sprig of thyme.
A few peppercorns.
Salt.
Now bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. Simmer as long as it takes to get the veggies tender. I can’t really tell you how long, since it depends on the veggies and your stove. What I CAN tell you is that you’re not trying for California al dente here . . . you want those veggies so soft you can cut them with your fork without their actually falling apart on you. Trust me, it tastes better that way. (I brought mine to the boil on the stove, then moved the pot to the top shelf of the woodstove that heats the house, clapped the lid on, and figured it was done when the house began to smell of vegetable mélange. A knife poked into the largest potato confirmed this.)
At this point, take the stew off the heat and let it sit until about a half hour before dinner. It’s better if you let it sit like that, and more convenient too . . . you can start it early in the day and then not have a last minute rush. Which makes it a kind of nice, unfiddly, cold weather dish for a family weekend.
When you’re getting ready to eat, put the stew back on low heat and bring it to a simmer. Make the dumplings. Essentially, this is biscuit dough that you add stuff to at will—in fact, if you like, you can use store-bought biscuit dough; that’d work fine. But biscuits are so easy to make, I just throw them together myself.
Two cups of flour (I use a mix of a few tablespoons of whole wheat and the rest white flour). Mix with a good 2 teaspoons salt and 3 teaspoons baking powder. I add minced parsley and scallions here—grated cheese (especially Cheddar or Parmesan or, come to think of it, Asiago) would be good too.
Cut in four tablespoons of chilled shortening—I use butter—until the flour looks like coarse meal. Pour in ¾ cup of milk (you can pretty much use any liquid you like—yogurt’s a favorite here, though I used milk this time) and stir with a fork. Add a little more milk to make the whole thing stick together nicely.
Now, back to the stew. First, stir in some frozen peas, as many as you like. (Don’t worry about thawing them; I never thaw frozen peas . . . they cook so quickly you don’t need to.) Bring stew back to simmer. Drop the dumpling mixture on top in balls and clap on the lid. DON’T PEEK FOR TWENTY MINUTES. They should be done then. You can tell by sticking a toothpick or skewer or similar into a dumpling and having it come out clean.
Serve in soup bowls with minced parsley lavishly sprinkled on top.
(We had this with coleslaw mixed with garlic mayonnaise. I have a trick for this one, too, that’s worth mentioning. I make the garlic mayo—aka aioli—in the food processor, then scoop out as much as I can into a bowl for use in a later meal. Then I chop up as much cabbage as I want and dump it into the mayonnaise-coated bowl. Chop it up so it mixes with what’s left of the mayo. I add some sauce back if I want it more mayonnaise-y. Saves bowls and cleanup, and I have some nice garlic mayo to have with the chickpea and chard stew I have planned for later in the week.)
You can do anything to this stew; it’s very flexible. Add more potatoes. Add more anything. Change vegetables—a fennel bulb and some celeriac would make good additions. Subtract almost anything. You have to keep the onion and the mushrooms and tomatoes, though, if you want it to taste really great. If it’s too thin for you, you can thicken it before adding the dumpling mix by whisking in 1 tablespoon butter mashed with 1 tablespoon flour, and bringing it back to a boil before dropping the heat down to a simmer.
It’s a playful kind of dish, and good for using up all those vegetables you bought to last awhile in the fridge because you got sick of going to the market all the time in bad weather. And it tastes special, too. If you have a vegetarian husband, like mine, you get extra-added benefits, as well. Because there’s nothing like a happy spouse for enlivening an evening, I find. Or, for that matter, any time.
It was really cold. And the kitchen is pretty far away from the woodstove. So the solution was to crank up the kitchen stove and leave it cranked up for a long time. And since I loathe waste in any size, shape or form, I shoved every manner of food I could into that oven and let it bake away.
Like this:
Scrubbed and pierced potatoes (we had some of these as baked potatoes for dinner; the rest I used for soup, or mashed up with cream and cheese, and stuck in a dish for baking for another dinner altogether).
Baked shredded carrots in cream (delicious that night, and the leftovers delicious warmed up for lunch, or, added to stock, made a great soup).
Mushrooms stood on their tops in a dish, drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper, scattered in the last fifteen minutes of cooking with chopped garlic and parsley (great on their own with toast, great on top of lettuce leaves for a warm salad, great cold next day).
Baked celery and onions (chopped celery ribs and onions parboiled for two minutes, put in a buttered dish with a drizzling of oyster sauce on top—great as is, and great mixed with hot rice later for a stir fry).
Apples in a dish with an inch of apple juice. (My breakfast the rest of the week, each one reheated with, maybe, a little cream and maple syrup . . .)
And . . . most importantly . . . best of all . . .
Tomatoes. These are the winter tomatoes that I despaired of in the market but couldn’t resist. And then I got them home and was depressed all over again at how they were hard like hockey pucks and white and green inside. But if there’s one thing I believe in, about food and, come to think of it, everything else, it’s Never Despair. So I cut them in half, laid them all out on a foil covered sheet, sprinkled them with coarse salt and nothing else, and BAKED AWAY. These can stay in as long as you like. When they come out, they’ll be shriveled and black around the edges and fervently tomato-ey. You can use them for anything at that point. I chopped one up to put on the next day’s lunch soup of kale and potato, and the first thing a bite of that soup said was TOMATO. Loud and clear.
Once you’ve filled your oven with your own version of events (whatever you’ve got that is calling out to be cooked) let everything bake for an hour or so—until the potatoes are ready—at 350°. And this lot can wait. I just keep an eye on it. If I’m having a good time talking with my loved one by the fire, I just turn the oven off and let everything nestle gently into edibility until the time we want to sit down at the table . . .
We had three foot of snow in a night and a day, and the power went out all over our little alpine valley.
This happens every winter. It’s not that much of a worry—at least not if you behave in a sensible fashion. You can always see it coming, and get in enough supplies to last till the roads open again. Our water is gravity fed, not electric pumped, and we have a woodstove to heat the house.
In years past, I would just cook on the woodstove. But now I have a nice propane gas stove, and all the burners work in an outage just fine.
Before it got dark, I hauled out all the various lanterns and candleholders we’ve collected through the years, and set them up. They were a little dusty but serviceable—I didn’t want to waste any of the stored hot water washing them, in case the power was out for days. When the sky darkened up, and we couldn’t see out the windows anymore to watch the trees and the snow turn dark green gray and then blue black, I lit them all. Then they weren’t just serviceable, but beautiful, too.
The room looked different then: softer, calmer . . . lovely. I will admit I was a little on the hyper alert side, making sure none of the candles were near anything that could possibly catch fire. But it was nice.
We sat there watching the fire for a while. Alex said one or two things about how the dogs must particularly like the atmosphere, since it probably mimicked the early years when their ancestors inched their way into the caves of man to get closer and closer to the center of warmth. But mostly we just sat there, drowsy and pleased. Probably I wouldn’t have felt that way if the outage had gone on for, say, three days, but for that moment it was all right.
Then we got hungry. So I thought about what would be the easiest, but a little bit festive, too. Since the room was lit up like a party anyway, we might as well have one. I had to plan it, sitting there by the fire, with as much care as possible, so I could haul everything out of the refrigerator at once and keep from opening the door unnecessarily. It might have to keep things cold without electricity for a while.
Scrambled eggs, I decided. Easy to cook those in the dark. And my scrambled eggs, based on a fervent admiration for MFK Fisher’s eggs, which are based on her fervent admiration for those of Brillat-Savarin, are particularly good and worth making in a dreamy, candlelit room.
I’d bought some smoked salmon for just an emergency like this—it’s always good to have little luxury items packed away for when you get snowed in, or there’s company dropped unexpectedly at your table, or you just feel a little blue. So it was creamy scrambled eggs with smoked salmon.
There was some leftover fennel root salad, and a little mesclun, so we’d have the eggs with a salad. I just tossed the fennel root, which marinated in a little lemon juice and olive oil, with the mesclun . . . the marinade was enough for a dressing.
And it was pretty easy to slice a few potatoes thinly and toss them in a very hot cast iron pan with some fat until they were browned, then turn them down and cook them inside, and finally toss some chopped garlic on top and mix the whole thing together. Salt and pepper.
But it was the scrambled eggs I wanted to tell you about, because they really are not what you think of when you think of scrambled eggs. At least, they aren’t what I used to think of when I thought of scrambled eggs. Which were thick curdy, almost dry, bits of the inside of an omelet. Delicious in their way, but completely consigned, in my own mind at least, to breakfast, with a couple of slices of thick bacon and some toast on the side. (When I say breakfast, of course, I mean breakfast at any time of day. Sometimes you just want to eat breakfast at night. This, however, was not one of those nights.)
These scrambled eggs of mine are more a creamy amalgam, kind of to those other scrambled eggs as a tall thin mysterious woman in a simple black dress is to a thirteen-year-old soccer star. Not better. Just different. And more appropriate to an adult dinner by candlelight.
So here is how you make Creamy Eggs with Smoked Salmon and Parsley:
Put a lump of butter in a cold pan. Crack however many eggs you want directly into the pan. Five is usually the right amount for two people, but you may be more or less hungry. I generally go for two eggs a person, and one extra for the pan. Add a soupspoon of sour cream. (You can use cream, or milk, or cream cheese, or . . . you get the idea. I used sour cream because I thought it would be nice with the salmon.) Gently stir the eggs around to mix the yolks and the whites, but don’t be too obsessive about it.
Now turn the heat to low under the pan. This is the dreamy part. It’s going to take awhile to cook the eggs this way, but you don’t want to let them get away from you, so you need to be somewhere in the vicinity to make sure they don’t. I use this time to chop a lot of parsley. (I like a lot of parsley.) I add the parsley as it gets chopped to the eggs, which now have collapsed into the melting butter and sour cream. I grind some pepper in, and add a little salt—only a little, since the salmon will take care of the rest later.
Then I shred the smoked salmon. You can use as much or as little as you like. Obviously, if you don’t fancy smoked salmon, or you don’t have any, you can add anything else at the appropriate time. Sautéed mushrooms. Grated cheese. A can of smoked oysters, drained. Some bits of leftover ham or roast duck. Etc. With smoked salmon, you don’t want to add it till the eggs have come off the fire, but those other things are nice warmed through at the tag end of the cooking.
Look at the eggs. They should just start being a creamy mass. Keep stirring them whenever you think of it. Stir from the bottom of the pan, so that you get the first cooked bits up and into the creamier layer on top.
This part can go on as long or as short as you wish. You shouldn’t cook them more quickly than fifteen minutes, though, I don’t think . . . at the lowest possible temperature, and stirring them so they’re creamy. I’ve put them on a flame tamer and had them go for half an hour. If they cook too quickly, you can take them off the flame and add a little more cream to cool them down . . . or another egg, stirred in. That works, too. You can always add another egg.
When the table’s set, and everything else is ready to go, and you get a little impatient, you can turn the heat up—a little—and keep stirring till the eggs are as creamy and cooked as you like. I like them very creamy, almost pourable, with maybe a little tension added in to distinguish them from just cream. You might like yours tighter. I don’t know. But when they’re done the way you like, take them off the heat and stir in the smoked salmon. Put them immediately on plates alongside the fennel and mesclun salad, and the potatoes. I put lemon quarters on the plates, too, if I have them. I like lemon squeezed on creamy eggs, especially when the eggs are made with smoked salmon.
Eat with a glass of white wine from the bottle you put out into the snow earlier to chill. Hope your companion is polite about the wax from the candle you used to cook by having found its way into the potatoes, and the matchstick that somehow got tossed into the salad in the dark, and enjoy.
These eggs won’t let you down, I promise. And the mix of things on the plate is a perfect amalgam of flavors, as they kind of blend into each other in the shadows of the candlelight.
When it’s snowing, my thoughts turn to full fat milk . . . and cream. I have endless arguments with friends about this, where they swear low fat milk has helped them diet, and I argue back that a smaller amount of full fat milk will nurture them and never harm them and help their body burn those other calories with renewed vigor. This I really do believe.
So to celebrate the snow, once in awhile for a winter dinner we have baked potatoes, and celery and onions baked with oyster sauce, and salad with blue cheese dressing . . . and carrots baked in cream. (I found the recipe in a highly underrated cookbook by Jane Sigal, Backroad Bistros.)
Those carrots are heaven.
This is how:
Grate about a pound and a half of carrots. Melt some butter in a skillet and cook the carrots, with a little salt, until they’re not raw anymore. Then add some cream (or crème fraiche, which I’ve never tried, as I only ever make this dish in the States, and just try finding decent reasonably priced crème fraiche here), about half a cup, more if you’re feeling blue.
Now, very important: GRATE SOME FRESH NUTMEG over all. Put it in a buttered casserole, cover, and stick in the oven with whatever else you’ve got baking until caramelized. Don’t undercook. It’s really the best when the carrots suck all the cream in and get brown around the edges. And it’s practically indestructible. It can go an hour at 375°, or even an hour at 400° . . . just give it a stir now and then, and just think, that’s one or two or three helpings of your daily vegetables you’re eating there. It will do you no harm at all. I promise . . .
I think I mentioned a woodstove heats our house in the mountains, and if I go away for even a few days, it’s like coming home to an igloo. The only thing to do is to get the fire as close to roaring as possible, go fetch the dogs home from the neighbors, and huddle with them by the stove.
There’s something quite pleasant about this (and of course it’s always fun to watch your breath freeze on the air in the comfort of your own living room). Especially since being post-trip means I’m usually stuffed with too many carbohydrates, sugars, oils, and other luxuries of modern urban living.
These are all nice, don’t get me wrong, but coming home to the fire makes me want to eat something more . . . elemental.
At times like these, all I want is tomato soup.
So, like this:
In a big soup pot, dump about a quart of whatever kind of broth you have (you don’t have to get fussy about this; it can be chicken broth and water, or bean broth, or veggie broth, or even just water and a little wine. I used duck broth I had in the freezer left over from the kindly carcass from my Thanksgiving bird). Then dump in one of those big cans of tomatoes. Any kind you like—diced are nice here, but definitely not necessary. Then add whatever herbs you’ve got around. Chop some parsley. I had some fresh thyme, and, on my way out of swimming at the Y, I snipped a little piece of rosemary off the bushes that line its parking lot there, so I chopped the thyme and rosemary leaves and added those with a bay leaf. Bring to a boil. Turn down to the simmer. (If you have a woodstove, just put the pot on the upper shelf.) Cover or not as you like. I usually cover it to start, then pull the cover off halfway to let it cook down. About a half hour in, taste it and add salt. At this point, if you like, add as many minced garlic cloves as you can stand. I added five. After about an hour—again, you don’t have to be fussy about this, if it tastes weak and you want it quickly, turn up the heat and cook it down while you stir; if you want to take your time, let it simmer as long as you like . . . the main thing is that it taste good, like tomato soup, in fact—taste it. Salt and pepper at will. If it’s ready, heat up some receptacle and pour it in. A nice wide mouthed mug is good, and portable, too—perfect for carrying over to the fire to eat while the rest of the house slowly heats itself back up.
If you’re looking to gild the lily, you can drizzle some olive oil on top. Or toast some bread and butter it and put that in the bottom of the bowl. Or spread the toast with goat cheese and dip. Or . . .
The next day I’d have it for lunch, maybe with cooked brown rice added, or maybe with some macaroni. Then it’s a whole different soup.
And I don’t have to think about it too much. I can go on unpacking the images and ideas I picked up on my trip, and go on holding them up speculatively to the light. And all the while, I’m very well fed.
No muss, no fuss. Which is very nice on a winter night.
