Thursday July 3
As we've already mentioned, Trader Joe's packages frozen sole in pound-and-a-half bags. It's too much for one meal, and once you've defrosted the bag, you have to use up the rest of the delicate fish quickly. That's our excuse for having (horrors!) THE SAME THING TWO DAYS IN A ROW.
We're also still eating light, undemanding, stick-to-it (ahem) foods. One of the best is rice. Barbara's grad school apartment on Frost Street was occasionally graced with the presence of Hitoshi Hashimoto, who gave us the recipe for what he called "Butta Rice" - actually, fried rice. For that, you need already-cooked cold rice, but today, it inspired a light, freshly-cooked imitation.
Rice takes longer than sole, obviously, so we started by melting some
butter in a small saucepan with a tight cover. In it, we sautéed a small diced
carrot and a few small tender
snap peas, the last in the garden, for a minute or so. Then we poured in a third of a cup of
rice, a pinch of
salt, and two-thirds of a cup of
water, and brought the whole thing to a boil. We slapped the cover on, lowered the heat to minimal, and let it go for 19 minutes by the timer (you can't mess with rice, it burns readily). When the timer goes, you open the rice and taste: if too moist, let it sit open for a minute; if too dry, steam closed for a minute; if perfect, fluff it up and leave it half-covered until ready to serve.
In the meantime, we took the
sole fillets and tossed them in a brown paper bag with
flour seasoned with a dash of
salt and
pepper. They were fried in the big skillet, in
butter and
oil, only about a minute on each side. Then they sat on hot plates in the warming oven while we added a big knob of
butter and a forkful of
capers to the skillet, until it browned and thickened. This got poured on the fish, and the rice adorned the side.
Okay, so it's a white meal. But it's what the people want.
At this point, perhaps we should expound on the difference between "rice" and "R*I*C*E."
"rice" is the raw, hard, little grains of the increasing expensive stuff, while "R*I*C*E" refers to the cooked, fluffy, tender mess of the increasing expensive stuff. This useful distinction was first introduced to the culinary world by that immortal opus, The Impoverished Students' Book of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery, by Jay F Rosenberg (1967), which got a lot of hippies through graduate school. Copies still turn up on abebooks.
2) Make a nice risotto however the heck you like. We used the last of the smoked duck broth, a little wine, and lots of water.
The pure essence of summer.
To the instructions, we would only add that with chard, it's best to treat the celery-like stems and spinach-like leaves separately. The eggs were the lovely Mennonite ones (actually the farmers were Mennonite; the chickens seemed agnostic, though with a preference for Hindus, Buddhists, or Pythagoreans) and they came out with perfect marigold-yellow-half-liquid-half-solid yolks. The tomatoes were some ones we had dried in the smoker and frozen. We didn't bother with rice, especially not brown rice, which we personally think turns any dish into Lent.
Anyway, we drove home kittenless, but with a dozen fresh-laid marigold-yolked eggs. So frittata for dinner was a natural choice, especially once Barbara picked two days' growth of baby zucchini and their blossoms from the garden.
Sunday July 13
In the meantime, we'd been boiling up a pot of cubed Yukon Gold potatoes. When they were done, we whipped them up with butter and cream and salt in the Kitchen Aid. Holt cannot think of mashed potatoes without crater gravy, so once the saltimboccas were out of the pan and on their warmed plates, he deglazed the pan with white wine and scraped the brown bits into a nice pork gravy. Not canonical for an Italian meal, but satisfying anyway.
Liz brought a nice bottle of sparkly wine from Australia, Taltarni (Brut taché). We had it along with the first appetizer: Holt's Cantaloupe Soupe, made with the aforesaid melon, apple juice, a little plain yogurt, and cinnamon, all zoomed up in the robo-coupe. The decorative topper was a little cinnamon, sprinkled and marbled by the chef himself.
Friday July 11
Thursday July 10
Holt had made dough (from Carol Field's The Italian Baker) for the birthday pizza earlier in the day, so while it warmed and rose, we had slices of canteloupe melon and white wine. Then he layered the crust with the fruits of farm and garden: local tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, squash blossoms and basil leaves from just outside the screen door. And it was perfect.
Saturday July 5
At this point, perhaps we should expound on the difference between "rice" and "R*I*C*E."
It opened with wild boar sausages on pineapple and melon chutney, floating on a cloud of julienned kohlrabi à la crème, and sprinkled with parsley and scallion. These were not the spicy, cured boar sausages you find in Italy, but ground and lightly seasoned loin meat, much more subtle.
Next came an inspiration, as if a Thai soup had been re-imagined in a New England kitchen: cream of corn soup with sautéed shrimp and fennel, tender and sweet, laced with a whiff of white truffle oil.
Andrea then opened and decanted our our Vieux Mas des Papes Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2003, to accompany something we'd never experienced before: creppuette of lamb, pairs of perfect frenched chops topped with shiitake mushroom slices and spinach, each one wrapped in caul fat, so that all the flavors had melded as they roasted. This was flanked by sautéed asparagus spears and "Parisienne" potatoes, tiny perfectly-roasted spheres rolled in poppy seeds.
Finally, dessert was a fan of sliced Ontario plums, topped with nutmeg-dusted Muscat sabayon, and scattered with local raspberries. Andrea and Stefan kindly joined us in a wine-tasting (or finishing) at the end, and we continued our discussion of local foods, customs, and oddities of the human race until well into one of our most enjoyable evenings ever.
