The Omnivorous Fish

When I was a wee lad, I discovered that not all restaurants had the same integrity when it came to preparing the food they served. I learned this in a small town in North Carolina when someone I was working with exclaimed, “Awesome, this is Stouffer’s.” And I said, “It tastes like Stouffer’s lasagna?” How disappointing, I told myself. “No,” he corrected me, “this is fucking Stouffer’s lasagna.”

And it was.

Years later, I saw the package of Stouffer’s lasagna that diners and coffee shops the nation over serve as their own. And let’s face it, as inauthentic lasagnas go, Stouffer’s is as good as or better than what your average crappy diner would come up with. So I ate it.

It turns out that Stouffer’s has a whole institutional division, facilitating all of America’s favorites: macaroni and cheese, meat lasagna, salisbury steak, chicken pot pie, christ only knows what else. Who knew?

When I was a kid on the road, those diners and coffee shops became more to me than food; good thing, too, because the food was awful. They were like little families I could fall into for a week, a day, a night. And they served terrible coffee that I drank too much of; provided ashtrays, which I filled to the brim over and over; and had beautiful, rock-hard old women in identical orthopedic shoes and grotesque masks of makeup, which served both to be pretty and to hide the years of disappointment. They were nice to that unique breed of lonely men that congregate around the counters of diners, and the drunks and the nit-picking old ladies filling plastic bags with the cheese bread. They laughed and popped their gum and smoked extra-long menthol cigarettes and growled out ‘Thanks, hon,’ as they dropped the check on the table.

I don’t eat like that anymore- much. Sometimes, though, grilled cheese with rock hard tomato or chicken soup with chunks of bouillon cube still floating around in it- or fucking Stouffer’s lasagna- take me back just far enough to remember I never want to go there again.

I’m in California. Southern California to be specific, in other words, I’m in hell. Ok, that’s a lie, it’s actually very nice (although I wouldn’t want to live here) here in Long Beach. I’m visiting several friends who have moved out here in the last two years, two of whom just had a baby (pictures to come). Now we’re headed to the local farmers’ market to pick up some provisions for our trip up to the cabin at Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Last night we had delicata squash, crimini mushrooms (which are white button mushrooms plus 3-4 weeks) and swiss chard on farfalle with some surprisingly good but ethically horrible processed pecorino-style cheese from the supermarket.

Zucchini alla Sara

The word Siciliy, in Italian, is pronounced see-CHEEL-ya. The way people actually say it in Sicily is more like see-JEE-ya. The “L” is annunciated, but rolled, sort of like Latinate “R”s. It’s almost aspirative, but the breath doesn’t really resonate the way it does with, say “pit.” Long story short, things that are Sicilian are often referred to as “SEE-jee” by Italians and “SIH-jee” by Italian Americans. (Sometimes Sicilians will also refers to things as al isola or isolata, meaning more or less “from the island.” I think this is archaic now, however.)

By ethnic extraction, I am half Sicilian, but most of my family of that side had either died or become completely Americanized by the time I was old enough to be cognizant of such things. My real immersion in the culture happened when I got into the pizza business, and worked with three different owners and their families who were direct-from-the-mountain Sicilian, two of whom were from the same town. I worked literally thousands of hours with these families, and learned a lot about Sicily past and present from them.

Two things that I took away from cooking with them (cooking for ourselves, not for the christiani, or customers) were freedom from tomatoes (although I love them) and a deep and meaningful respect for and admiration of vegetables. I once watched my first boss’s wife, Sara, slice an enormous zucchini, the likes of which I had never seen before, and had come from her garden, salt it in a colander and weight it with cans of tomatoes, a treatment I had only ever seen for eggplant (by my mother for her absolutely ethereal eggplant parmigiana). After a few hours (the lunch rush), Sara unceremoniously dropped these limp, wet slices of squash into the deep fryer, creating a cacophony of gurgling and splattering that was the antithesis of everything I had learned to want from safe deep frying. It was magical. Once they emerged, she sauteed some garlic in olive oil and we ate the whole mess on pasta. Specifically dry spaghetti, only occasionally did we eat short pasta, and fresh pasta was infrequently seen and reserved for more refined sauces.

The zucchini slices were tranformed into mahogany-bubbled crispy-mushy pieces of heaven. They were sweet and savory and salty and greasy, in a good way. That meal has stuck with me the way few have. The way it was “Italian food,” which I had been eating all my life, but was completely alien to me, the care Sara took preparing it and the warmth with which she included me in her family’s meal.

We have kitchens in the hotel here in Greenville, SC, and I went to the “Bi-Lo” with my boss when we got here. It’s pretty unremarkable as chain supermarkets go, and it was actually kind of bizarre to be in one. The only supermarkets I ever go in in are Whole Foods or Fairway, which are by and large unlike most supermarkets (at least the Whole Foods on 24th and 7th in Manhattan). So I bought all these groceries, including the aforementioned eight-ball squash and was stranded at the hotel this morning, so I decided to cook. As a point of information, the recipe below will require about 40 packets of salt and about 5 of pepper, if you’re making it in a hotel room.

Pasta con Zucchini alla Sara
amply serves 2 for lunch, 3 if one of them is an anorexic actor

1/2 pound dry pasta, short or long (I used Barilla rotini)
1 large eight-ball squash (8-10 oz)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, approximately

3 or 4 cloves garlic, chopped (about 1.5 tbsn)
1/2 small serrano chile, chopped finely (about 1 tsp)
1 small tomato, diced (about 2/3 cup)

salt and pepper
grated (or chopped) hard cheese, such as sharp provolone or romano (this is an instance where the richness of parmesan cheese would be inappropriate), for sprinkling on pasta

Slice the squash in half through the stem and trim it away. If the squash is very seedy, you can scrape some of the seeds away, but try not to lose any/much flesh. Slice the squash into half-moons (or crescent moons, if you’ve seeded) and layer into a colander set over a sheet pan or plate, salting every layer thoroughly. Invert a plate over the zucchini (one of small enough diameter not to be impeded by the colander as the zucchini level lowers) and place weights on the plate, such as cans of tomatoes or gold bricks. If your arrangement is such that there is any chance of the zucchini or its juice contacting the weights, wrap them in plastic wrap just to be safe. Let this sit for at least an hour, until the zucchini are softened and the drip of moisture into the sheet pan is no longer noticeable. This will vary a lot on your squash.

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add 1 tbsn salt for every 2 quarts. (I once heard someone say that it mattered whether you salted the water before or after the water boiled. That’s ludicrous. [My mother claims that the salt makes the water boil faster. There’s no scientific basis for this that I’m aware of, and informal kitchen experiments tell me this is not, in fact, true.])

Meanwhile, lay the zucchini out on paper or clean cloth towels to drain. Heat a saute pan over medium-high heat and add extra virgin olive oil until it is about 1 cm (3/8”) deep in the pan. Test the oil by dipping the corner of one zucchini slice in the oil. If it sizzles violently, it’s ready. Add the zucchini slices in a single layer, working in batches if necessary. If you end up between batches without a full pan, adjust the heat so that the oil doesn’t darken and smoke. Fry the zucchini until darkened and blistered all over its surface, about 2 minutes per side. When turning the zucchini, turn it away from you, so if the oil splatters it splatters away from you.

As you take the zucchini out of the oil, put it on a plate and grind black pepper over it (or shake your packet). Do not drain on paper towels, this zucchini-olive oil will become the sauce.

Add the pasta to the boiling water, stirring occasionally. If your stove sucks, like the one at my hotel and can’t keep the water at a vigorous boil, cover the pot about half-way. DO NOT cover it completely. Dump out the oil you’ve cooked the zucchini in (unless it is really clear and flawless) and add 2 tbsn fresh oil to the pan. Add the garlic and the chili and saute until the garlic barely begins to brown around the edges. Add the zucchini and heat through. Add the tomato, stir and take off the heat.

Cook the pasta until just barely al dente, or “to the tooth,” meaning when it has softened, but still needs to be bitten through. It should be neither crunchy nor mushy. Keep in mind the pasta will continue to cook after it has been drained.
Take some of the pasta water out of the pot with a pyrex or metal cup and reserve. Drain the pasta. With some water still clinging, add the pasta to the zucchini and toss thoroughly. If the sauce seems a little “tight” or if you like it liquid, add some pasta water. Keep in mind, however, this does not make a sauce like you might me used to. There are three autonomous components to the dish: pasta, vegetables and lingering juices.

Put the pasta in bowls and sprinkle with grated cheese. Serve immediately.

Listening: Dogs Among the Bushes by the Chieftans from the The Best of the Chieftans

When I worked with Alsatians, they were serious about two things: le football and pate sablee. My boss made the most delectable Linzer tarts with jam his mother made. Maybe I’ll do a recipe someday, but for now I leave you with this:

If I were a linzer tart, I’d want to be a good one,
glistening, crystallized, catching the early morning light in a thousand brilliant directions, my sides gently oozing with moist, moist jam;
so sweet, but not overly so.

If I were a linzer tart, I’d want to be a good one because I’ve seen the bad ones,
mushy, dejected, sitting under a plexiglass safe at the diner; breakfasttime refugees, noble and sad all at once, with powdered sugar retreating into sinkholes of shortening and water.

If I were a linzer tart I’d have my own tray,
maybe with a doily, maybe not, but I’d have my dignity.

I wouldn’t be heaped halfway underneath the bear claws.

I was reading Shuna’s blog today, and if you don’t follow it, you should. She’s a baker, patissiere, cook, writer, food and all around genius. Anyway, following links, I found this post that talks about the humanity of being an intelligent, sensitive person in a less than supportive environment. One of the things that keeps me going back to Eggbeater over and over again is her plainspoken narration of working in an environment where you’re often surrounded by overeducated people who are unable to come to grips with the fact that they have a blue collar job.

I understand this phenomenon well. I apprenticed to a chef briefly and worked in restaurants. I am now a stagehand, which is just as bad. I work alongside people, in an hourly paid, per-diem job that have master’s degrees from Yale. I’m not exaggerating. There is a multitude of them. They think they work in the arts, but in reality they pick up dirty cable and lighting instruments and pack them in and out of boxes and push said boxes on and off of trucks. I went to college for about an hour, and I tell them what to do.

Anyway, with any job where you’re part of a team, it’s largely the personalities that make it interesting. Restaurants and theaters have a lot in common: they are shit jobs that usually don’t pay very well where you do backbreaking work for minimal appreciation during hours that most people spend at home. For whatever reason, this environment draws more characters than say, the avergae CPA’s office. And, as unpleasant as it can be, it does leave one with a plethora of interesting memories, some awful, some hysterical. Very often, they go hand in hand. Case in point, Shuna’s negative experience reverberated in my memory with a bakery of Christmas Past, where I basically grew up. That memory, however, sent my head to another, much more funny memory that I’ll share.

The bakery was air-conditioned, so we had what’s called a proof box, which is basically an anti-refrigerator. It is a closed room that is heated with steam; thus we had a boiler. One day, one of the steam lines sprung a leak, and whenever the system’s pressure went up, a jet of visible steam shot out at ankle level from the boiler (right next to the bench where we worked- very safe) and drifted upwards. The red light from the exit sign beyond was vaguely visible, and almost shot through the steam, like a stage light. So, the next time the steam hit, I trudged directly into it, air guitaring and singing “Jumpin Jack Flash” to raise hell.

In retrospect, it’s not really all that funny (despite the fact that we all nearly pissed ourselves at the time), but at 4AM when you got up for school at 6 the previous day and have been at the bakery since 11, what’s funny can be relative.