joy comes in so many flavors these days, and here’s Canine Sherman’s favorite way to express it:
joy also comes in the form of salted caramel ice cream. the recipe calls for 5 egg yolks and a shitload of milk/butter/cream. turn the orphaned egg whites into pizza dough, top with salami, avocado and fall tomatoes and pretty much the day is done.
here then, is my self-portrait in caramel, and yes, that’s a really thick layer of caramel. i’m working on the technique, obviously, but the ice cream? it’s really intense and absolutely amazing. plus a little goes a long way, which goes with the current trend of “doing more with less”, or “more with the same” type of corporate-speak.
i realized that i had a brain melt the other day and forgot the most important part of the commie pizza story.
we stood in line for a while waiting to order, but when it was our turn, the pizza guy said “we are out of cheese…but i don’t want you to wait, so can you come back in an hour?”
apparently, commies must think that there are different ways of waiting. my friend suggested we “go get martini drys” which i agreed was a marvelous idea, since we had just waited in line for bupkis, and had perfectly stomach empties.
i wondered if i had ever seen an actual martini in Italy before, and whether my friend got that line from James Bond. being a jazz musician, many of his phrases in English come from reading jazz lyrics, like “the girls were working the streets!” or “Oh, to live in Frisco.” turns out he was talking about the Italian brand of vermouth called Martini, which is drunk in Italy as an aperitivo, and is actually what he thought the rest of the world was talking about when they said “martini.” though the name of the cocktail is probably taken from the Martini brand, it’s not quite the same, especially when it comes to packing a punch.
my brain melt might have been from my recent PBJ on a hamburger bun. i was in an office and one of the girls offered me a PBJ. when she looked in her fridge she realized she didn’t have any “normal” bread (and she didn’t want me to wait)…
many years ago we were in Florence, Italy, and a friend of ours took us to a Communist Pizza Party. it was outdoors and there were old communists square dancing and young communists eating pizza. on offer were three different pizzas: one with marinara and cheese, one with marinara, cheese and mushrooms, and one with marinara, cheese and salami. i found it hilarious that the price-for-a-slice was not the same. my italian friend looked at me disgustedly and said, “of course not, mushrooms and salami cost more money.” my asinine viewpoint was that the labor to make the pizzas was the same, and since they were Communists, then the price should be the same. to this day my friend does not find this even remotely funny.
so here’s to you – dear square dancers:
pizza with salami, parmesan, cheddar, tomatoes, zucchinis, zucchini blossoms stuffed with St. Andre, and avocado bonanza…
this year there’s a debate that cooking has supplanted knitting as the “new yoga.”
but most of this cooking stuff is really about High Chefery. we have Chefs with Designer Footwear, Chefs Undercover (writing “tales from the trade” novelettes, with titles such as “Under Hot Water,” “Hung High and Dry Like a Cold Cut,” “Kept in the Dark and Fed Shit – My Life as a Mushroom in So and So’s kitchen”), Chefs as Celebrities—full scale photos of them in their pearly white outfits on the walls of their establishments or previously mentioned mugshots on said assorted condiment labels—and Chefs That Are Too Busy to Care, by far the saddest and the most pandemic of the lot.
real cooking, to me, is a matter of keeping relativity in mind—comparing what you start out with (or what’s in your fridge) and what you end up eating. a chef once told me the reason he loves baking is because the end product is larger than the dough. meat, he said, “always tends to shrink.” (“unless you eat it raw,” says the sheepherding-is-the-new-yoga members of this family.)
cooking is also a matter of scale. i’d rather have a really small piece of something fabulous than a million pieces of something half-assed, because the “ever-wanting” feeling is way more satisfying than having had my fill.
here’s a professional of the “ever wanting” group.
my teeth are in really great shape (“only floss the ones you want to keep!”) but i do make a point to see my dentist at least three times a year. mostly it’s because my visits include drinking coffee out of his vacuum pot with his freshly roasted beans (kenyan, usually).
there’s a whole rigmarole with the coffee production that assures me that he’s a fabulous dentist, (he even weighs his grind out before putting it into his 3x espresso basket) but my favorite is that when it comes down to cleaning out the coffee roaster, he’s really just performing dentistry with a shop vac. can you open up a little wider?
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–a bonanza of fava beans. god, there’s never enough. lucky for me it’s also green garlic season so sauteing the two together in butter makes everyone lick their plates so clean there’s no dishwashing here until tomato season!
–indecision:
–crazy assed yet beautifully designed Chinese coffee tins:
yes, i did try a packet of “cappuccino,” and no, it was no cappuccino. frothy, maybe, but definitely on the “mild dimensions” side.
and all sorts of other helpful creatures standing by…
ever since we moved here our neighbor’s avocado tree has borne no fruit. sometimes i get the suspicion that he thinks it’s not a coincidence. i think (he’s over 80 years old) that he did get fruit these last few years, he just didn’t see them…
this year everyone wins, the garden and his avo tree is FULL of flowers and the squirrels pick up the fruit and run over the wires and drop them in our yard.
thanks!
today’s agenda is to cover everything with chocolate. we’ve got: candied tangerine peels (after eating the inside of a tangerine from Westfield Farms the immediate thought is what to do with the outside), candied ginger (ok, i bought those), bananas (which we’ll freeze and eat as if we’re on Catalina Island), coffee beans (no duh), and cacao beans (how recursive).
it’s sort of a magical process, bringing the temperature up, then down, then slightly up until the chocolate is perfectly tempered for dipping. then sit back and watch the surface as it turns into a lovely matte sheen, turning each piece of tangerine peel into a small reflection of sunset.
yay! it’s spring, and while we wait for the bees to finish pollinating the fava beans (planted last December, part of the economic meltdown where we switched from computers to agriculture) we’re putting down our tomato seeds.
we’ve got Costoluto Genovese, Yellow Pear, Japanese Black Trifele and one other. oh and some larger pots of parsely, sage and basil. more of a small ditty than a Simon and Garfunkle song but heck, rosemary grows like a weed here.
