Our vacation is, technically speaking, over. However, since everyone else’s hasn’t quite started yet, the holiday atmosphere goes on and on, and for me that means good food.
Nick kicked it off: after our week in the south he insisted on cooking for every remaining night of his time off from work, and making most of the lunches, as well. The most notable accomplishments were a chicken curry and a Caesar salad so rustic and generally European that you could only describe it as “dark.” The salad left me with overpowering garlic-breath the next day that tempered my enthusiasm ever so slightly, but that curry dish…I don’t like spicy food, as a rule, but I just kept eating it. I picked peppers and sauced rice off of Nick’s plate long after he was full; I dug through the fridge to find some rich vanilla yogurt to alternate bites so that I would be able to keep eating. I think that I kept eating that one dish for nearly three hours, because my progress was so slow and painful, but so, so worth it.
His week of experimentation, naturally, left me with the overpowering need not to be completely outdone.
Fortunately, I seem to have experienced another of my increasingly commonplace rounds of palate expansion in the last couple of months: I find myself mixing anchovy paste into the randomest things, and the other day I cheerfully served us broccoli leaves. I’ve spent three hours in the kitchen in one night, stirring milk into eggplant with one hand while the other held a bell pepper skewered over an open burner. On one memorable occasion Nick suggested that I “just put everything in the oven” when I expressed doubt about our current groceries; he got a Japanese soup of homemade chicken broth layered with ginger, curry, mirin, soy, and bonito flakes.
Part of it is that cursed Provençal cookbook I mentioned, and it doesn’t hurt that Nick has been on a Top Chef kick in recent weeks. There are just all of these ideas floating around out there, and then I met this American woman who is, in fact, writing two cookbooks as we speak in France, and it turned out that she reveres a farmer who comes to my market twice a week. He’s a rare breed around here: he grows the stuff himself, unlike most of the merchants who have mysterious, unnamed suppliers in the background. So everything he sells is local and seasonal, and his line goes down the block nearly all of the time.
I find this incredibly intimidating.
Not only does it feel like I should just know which of his fifty varietals of zucchini or cauliflower I want, but there’s then there’s a whole line of impatient French women tapping their sensibly-heeled shoes while I stammer because they know exactly which items they want, so when am I going to get on board, already?
But I decided to try again.
It fell apart almost immediately when I asked for a bunch of beets. “Large or small?” my saleswoman asked, and I just don’t know. I had a beet in Burgundy for the second time ever, thought it was really good (for the first time ever), and wanted to experiment, but large or small? Are the smaller ones sweeter, or the large ones more tender? Would a more experienced beet-cooker know these things, or is it just about preference?
I dropped out of the line and moved over to the side of the counter, whispering, “Honestly, it’s the first time I’ve ever made them, so if you have any advice….”
“Raw, or cooked?”
I couldn’t help but feel like this was going to reflect on my intrinsic character somehow, but the second she asked I simply knew that I was going to cook them one way or another, and I told her so as confidently as I could manage.
She shrugged. “The small ones cook faster.”
Gotcha.
One bunch of small beets…and those nifty-looking broccoli florets with all the leaves still on…and that gorgeous white eggplant in the back…and now I wish I hadn’t already bought some heirloom tomatoes, but I’ll be back on Friday for yours….
So I roast beets and broccoli greens with pasta twists, and Nick makes “ketchup” out of red peppers and balsamic vinegar. I candy baby onions in truffle vinegar; he braises fennel in saffroned chicken broth. He’s winning; do I need to say that he’s winning?
Either way, we’re eating impossibly well these days.