Sunday Dinner Part One- a little late
I’ve learned a valuable lesson in blogging: the whole point is that the entry is momentary. IE, it’s a blog entry not an article. I have been working on the entry below since Sunday evening, and this morning it hit me that it’s ok to do these things in installments. Enjoy. More to come.
Cooking has become a decreasingly frequent activity for me because of moving, renovating and moving again (and getting ready to renovate again), among other things. Recently, however, part of my batterie de cuisine has seen light for the first time since October. Some very familiar pots and pans came out recently to dull the sleeping-with-another-man’s-wife sensation of cooking in a foreign kitchen.
To celebrate this coup, I enlisted a veteran taster to make an evening of it. On another day, say a Monday, Wednesday or Saturday, we could have taken a short walk to the greenmarket, but being a Sunday, we were left to go to our local Whole Foods. (I could take this as an opportunity to rant about said ersatz health food store, but I’ll leave that for every other waking moment of my life.) Here’s what we came up with:
Mozzarella Salad with Tomatoes Just like it sounds. Extra virgin olive oil, sea salt (coarse), black pepper. What else can you say about it? It’s not really tomato season yet, and it shows. To drink, we opened the Toro mentioned below, had a few sips and let it air out. We also drank water like it was going out of style: the new kitchen isn’t air conditioned yet.
Steamed Striped Bass with Tapenade on Dinosaur Kale The steamer basket is still in storage, so I did the the old Jeff Smith: four tinfoil balls in a frying pan full of water. Balance a plate on top, and just like that, a steamer. (You could also turn a little heatproof bowl upside down, but they tend to rattle, and I’m jittery enough when I cook.)
The cuisinart is also in storage, and the blender happened to be out so I learned not to make tapenade in a blender. It seems to go right from the too-big-pieces stage to the liquid stage. Eh, it’s certainly not hard to make by hand. Ordinarily, tapenade is what some people would call a “pantry item,” meaning something you always have around, or something you always have the makings of around, but since I formulated the idea while still at the store, I managed to forget that the kitchen still is not yet wholly mine, and therefore the pantry is not yet so equipped. Usually it is a salty punch of a spread/sauce made of chopped oil-cured olives, anchovies, capers (tapeno: the provençal word for caper), olive oil and- learned from maitre cuisinier Jacques Pépin- a dried black mission fig for sweetness. This time it was something different, but not bad.
A slice of steamed fish was anointed with a dollop of oily tapenade and situated on a bed of sauteed “dinosaur” kale. Washed and shaken, but not spun, dry- with the stems REMOVED- the kale was cooked with olive oil, salt, pepper and, just before plating, a squeeze of lemon.
Not that it has anything to do with anything, but dinosaur, tuscan (cavolo nero) and lacinato kale are botanically identical; they are just names. I include this tidbit because it took me 2 years to determine this definitively.
What did we drink? Albert Mann Cremant D’Alsace, a dry, minerally sparkler. Like prosecco’s teutonic cousin, it was crisp and austere, but refreshing and refreshingly free of the sweetish confines of a lot of chardonnays, and a totally different animal than all that pinot grigio every magazine editor seems to have been drinking lately. (Everyone keeps telling me there is a wave of bone dry non-oak American chardonnays about to wash me from the shores of incredulity, but here I stand, incredulous.)
TTFN.
