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Monday, May 23, 2005
what I ate last: potato salad and corn-on-the-cob Post pig-roast and all the accompanying business, and now that I am living alone in the vastness of Beacon Street, my culinary habits are returning to their idosyncratic norm. No flatmate to look aghast when I start chopping up fish heads, as I did last night, to make a fish soup (does no-one know that the cheeks are the best bit?) No-one to have to share my freshly made pesto with. No-one to think I'm strange to eat potato salad and corn-on-the-cob for dinner (no meat? what?) I'm sorry, but despite the prominence of the dish in their culinary culture, American's don't know how to make potato salad. Mostly what they make is mush. What's the deal with the semi-mashed potatoes, the sour cream and mayonnaise, the weird other bits and pieces that they insist on putting in the 'salad'? It's definitely one subject that my food fascism comes out in full force on. Potato salad should have decent-sized chunks of slightly floury potato (each one probably big enough for two mouthfuls), should have real, homemade mayonnaise, and should not have anything else in it apart from optional fresh chopped parsley, perhaps a little bit of cripsy bacon and maybe some freshly boiled peas. Other stuff is definitely starting towards a different dish and one that probably should not include the mayonnaise. You see, for me, potato salad is all about honoring mayonnaise. I can't stand the shop-bought stuff almost to the point of nausea, but there's few things I love better than home-made, butter-yellow, mayonnaise, a teensy bit bitter from the olive oil (a bitterness that is perfectly offset by the sweetness of potatoes) and sharp and fresh from lemon juice. There are family traditions, and this is one...although it didn't stop my father and myself having a full-blown row about the making of mayonnaise one summer lunchtime, just before our guests arrived to find us in stony silence at opposite ends of the kitchen. (This experience briefly jinxed my mayonnaise-making skills when in my father's presence - for some reason, every time he was around it curdled embarrassingly and I had to start again, which is perhaps the nearest I've got to experiencing the embarrassment of losing an erection.) There are days when I will dream up an entire menu just so I have the excuse to make mayo. Y'all out there, it's not hard. Just get an egg yolk at room temperature, add a tiny bit of olive oil, whisk vigorously, add a little bit more, whisk, and so forth just going slow until you've got around a cupful off the stuff, which if it is stiff and not runny means you have passed the danger of curdling and can start adding more oil in larger dollops. At this stage you can add a little lemon juice if you want - it makes the thing looser and easier to whisk - or you can wait till the end to add it to taste. (This was the issue we argued about, and now, dear father, aren't you glad that I'm grown up enough to allow my readers both options!) A single yolk is enough to make a good amount of mayo. Just keep adding the oil and reminding yourself that as it's olive oil it's not all that bad for you and it will soak up all those free radicals racing around your body. Or something. At the end season to taste, add some mustard if that's your thing, or the herbs. Then enjoy... 0 comments permalink  
Friday, May 13, 2005 what I ate last: Spaghetti with tomato sauce, fresh basil and real parmesan Again, a lack of posts for which apologies, but for once this is not to do with a lack of decent food...I've been eating unusually well this last week thanks to a visitor from far-flung places who stayed overnight in Atlanta and knew what to buy there for me...so from DeKalb farmers market came a cornucopia of delicious produce which we devoured with glee. I'd forgotten how good real shrimp could be - grey, uncooked ones sauted with a bit of garlic and chilli. And real mozzarella, and tomatoes that actually taste of something. Fresh goats cheese. Pak choi. Real lettuce. Kiwi fruit. Wine all the way from France, Europe. And also, it was so good to have people in town who actually care about food. So, smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfasts outside in the Alamo, picnics by the river, proper dinners in Beacon Street. Justine and Tom, you probably didn't think any of this was particularly civilised or abnormal, but it was a very long way from my usual solo and gone-to-seed life of snatched breakfasts and dinners, like tonight, with my laptop. 0 comments permalink
Monday, May 02, 2005 what I ate last: spaghetti with spinach, garlic and fresh grape tomatoes I realised tonight while cooking that it really has been a long time since I actually made myself a meal. Cheese on toast, or miso soup to cure my bout of fever doesn't count. I started to cook...wow, a couple of weeks ago, but got scuppered half way through my risotto by a last-minute dinner invite from a neighbouring Rural Studio-er. I still made my risotto as a side dish and brought it along, but somehow that's not the same a sitting down to a meal that you planned out from start to finish. So tonight's simple spaghetti somehow felt good, especially accompanied by a bottle of Volpaia Chianti that I had saved from a previous Atlanta trip for just such a moment... 0 comments permalink
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