To Market

Today Z and I went down to the Union Square Green Market. I almost feel as though that should be the post in itself, because there's no really good way to describe it. We wandered past stalls with corkscrew-curly garlic tops, and saw broccolinni it a leafier form called Chinese Broccoli. We saw fresh eggs and fresh pheasant sausage. We wandered past stalls with herbs carefully labeled and stalls full of herbs with no labels at all, where the knowing got what they wanted. We saw stalls with fresh flowers and flowers in pots and herbs in pots and pots. Z munched on a chocolate chip muffin and we bought glasses of mint ice tea sweetened with maple syrup that was so good we had to go back for seconds. There was one stall selling dirt -- just rich, amazing, organic, composty dirt by the pound. There was one stall with nothing but lettuce in something like 10 or 15 different varieties. It was three times the size of most of the stalls. There was a stall selling nothing but little pots of growing wheatgrass, with information explaining that everything that walks or flies eats wheatgrass (including pictures of birds and dogs and cats and hamsters and guinea pigs all happily munching the stuff).

I bought a pound of assorted wild mushrooms from the mushroom lady. She was far too cool to punch her mushrooms together into "assorted wild". I achieved it by buying 1/4 of oyster mushrooms, 1/4 of shitakes, and half a pound of creminis. I am unsure I have spelled any of these mushroom varieties right, but they are lovely. I will cook them tomorrow into a creamy pasta sauce with gorgonzola cheese and little sweet peas (which are, sadly, best bought frozen).

I also bought a new potted mint plant, because the one I had wasn't lovin' me. It was too small to be happy in a pot, it needed to be replanted and allowed to spread. I also set it in the sun, forgetting that mint is shade loving. That and I killed it from too much iced tea. This is beautiful spearmint, with that sweet smell that only spearmint has. It is also bushier, with lots of stems from which to pick. I think it will do well.

And I bought a big old chicken, fresh and organic, which I will roast later on this week and turn into delicious leftovers, and I bought two tiny little Persian cucumbers which I will slice thin and serve as a salad before the creamy mushroom pasta, light and cool to foil the richness of the dish. And I bought two pints of blueberries, one for snacking and one to turn into a blueberry tart. I want to pre-bake a tart crust, then fill it with pastry cream and top with the blueberries and glaze with red-currant glaze. I made this once before, when I was no sort of cook but happened across Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. It came out fine, which is a minor miracle. I'm hoping I can make it any better this time. It is to finish off tomorrows dinner -- you may have guessed I'm cooking for company tomorrow. I cook for company almost every week, because I love an excuse to make something fancy or even just more complicated, and I love feeding people, and we need a reason to make sure the apartment gets clean.

What else? Ah, yes, tonight's dinner. For tonight's dinner I bought fresh beautiful cherry tomatoes. I am going to quarter or halve them and toss them with linguine and torn basil from the terrace and some beautiful olive oil Z's mother gave us. That will be the main course.
And before that? Fried zucchini blossoms.

My favorite food writer, Laurie Colwin, writes of theses in a chapter in her book Home Cooking. There is basically nothing in this book I don't want to make. And Z has had these before, though I haven't, and loves them, and they have such as short season so I thought, why not? It will be a grand and relatively safe adventure: I many ever have cooked or eaten them, but everybody seems to love them, and I have a recipe from one of my favorite cooks of all.

I will eat them on the terrace, and tell you what they're like.

The World

I am at work. I am supposed to be making sure a recipe by Ina Garte is correctly reproduced for another publication. Instead I got lost in a picture at the beginning of her book of a table set at the very edge of an apple orchard in the late afternoon in summer, with golden light and vasses of grasses and herbs set out, and the dedication: 'My home is whever Jeffrey is'.
At table set up and someone to love.
I love Zachary. We do not have a perfect relationship, but instead of worrying me, that fills me with hope. We have our entire lives to figure out how best to make eachother happy. We've come so far in that in the past three years (we used to make eachother miserable), and I am confident we'll make it there. We'll make eachother happier than anybody else in the world, because the happiness one is experiencing is always the greatest of all.
And! I want to feed the world. The whole world. I want to set up tables in fields and cover them in dishes. I want to cook everything for everybody. I want people to stop conversing because of food, and I want peope to converse because of food.
That's how it's going to be, for my life.
I will love Zachary. My home will be with him, and my heart will be full of love, and I will feed the world.

Basil on the Terrace

Dinner: beef with broccoli.
When I was much younger, I don't know, maybe 11, maybe as old as 13 I wanted to make this. But I made the crucial mistake of starting to cook when I was hungry, and I didn't much know about reading recipes yet. The beef marinates for 20 minutes.
I was not a fan of that at all.
I just remember waiting, and messing up, and waiting, and not getting anything particularly delicious at the end.
Tonight was good. Peppery, with a good thick sauce. As often happens when I make stir fry, the meat was a little tough, but not hugely. It was a tasty meal over rice, and streched to fit three comfortably (Z had a friend over to feed).
It went well with chocolate chip cookies cooked till still very soft in the middle. I'm not much of one for Asian desserts. After stir-fry or fried rice I always want brownies or cookies or ice-cream. A nice easy familiar sweet.
Then time passed and, as will happen, we got hungry again. Z's parents had brought us two loaves of cinnamon challa, so we took one out of the freezer, thawed it in the microwave and cut off thick slices from the diameter. I soaked them in three eggs combined with somewhere between a quarter and a half cup milk -- closer to a half, and maybe three tablespoons of cream. No cinnamon needed.
I fried them in butter in my cast iron skillet (9 inches) and we ate. The cinnamon sections turns hot and melty, and the whole thing was really nicely eggy and soft.
Delicious.
I'm going to go eat some more of it.