Misadventure in the kitchen

 

Picture from Honest Cooking
note the charred lemon

My friend Phil Green loves anchovies. I somehow got the impression he would not eat them, but Subie said, “Oh, no, he loves them.” So I suggested supper Sunday night—I’d make an anchovy entrée, if Subie would bring a salad. I had in mind a New York Times recipe I’d saved for smashed potatoes with anchovy and tuna.

But the more I looked at that recipe, the less sure I was. What if Phil doesn’t eat tuna? Several men in my family refuse to have anything to do with even the really good stuff I buy from the cannery in Oregon (Colin on the other hand loves it, so it’s a frequent birthday gift for him). I wasn’t sure about potatoes, and then I looked at the fingerlings that Central Market sent with my order. They are, at the least, thumb potatoes. When I wanted delicate Yukon Gold fingerlings, I got fat, odd-shaped red potatoes. I lay awake in the night worrying about this dinner until it dawned on me that I’d cook an anchovy pasta. Problem solved. I slept.

This morning I searched for anchovy pasta recipes—you have no idea how many there are online, many of them identical and many calling for capers. I did that once several years ago, and the capers overshadowed the anchovies. So I settled on a recipe that suggested artichoke hearts, chopped, as a substitute for the capers, and all of it in a brown butter sauce. And charred lemon cheeks—I who dislike the current fad for charring everything in sight, charred some lemons by putting them briefly, cut side down in a hot skillet. If you don’t know what a lemon cheek is, it’s the half lemon you get when you slice the fruit vertically instead of horizontally. I couldn’t see that charring affected the taste of the lemons or the sauce, but it sure made the skillet hard to clean. I laid out ingredients and dishes and went off to take a nap.

A deep but not comforting sleep, in which I dreamt my mom and I were cooking, and she kept cleaning up where I was cooking, causing me to spill everything. I swear I went through two pounds of butter in that dream! And somehow carrots got into the sauce but when I tried to cook them, they shriveled into tiny, charred lumps (that must have been Christian’s influence because he won’t eat cooked carrots). I decided reality was better than my dream and woke up.

Dinner turned out better than I could have, should have hoped. Instead of cooking right up to the last moment, I chopped the parsley and artichokes, made the brown butter sauce, laid out the pasta plates. After the Greens had settled in with some wine and brie on crackers, I turned up the pasta water that I’d had simmering and cooked the pasta. Subie helped me with draining the pasta—some things are awkward to do from a wheelchair—and I stirred in chopped parsley, topped each pasta bowl with grated pecorino—and forgot to take a picture. But it was good, and my guests raved. For dessert? Those mini chocolate ice cream cones Jordan gets at Trader Joe’s.

It was a pleasant evening visiting with old friends. We talked about politics, but we also talked about old times and people we know—and the talk took me away momentarily from the world crisis. For me, the day started with uncertainty—the news that Putin had put his nuclear detection force on alert was alarming to say the least. That he would even put the “nuclear” word into play. And tonight news followed that Belarus has declared it is no longer a nuclear-free territory. I’m uncertain about that. Does it mean they’ve had nuclear capabilities all along and have been hiding them?

Balancing that was a bit of news that didn’t get much play—Ukraine officials have agreed to meet with Russian representatives on the border between Ukraine and Belarus. At this critical point, any meeting seems to me to hold out hope. Putin is not finding the invasion as easy as he thought, but still Ukraine is being devastated. Pray that they can come to some mutual ground over the negotiation table. Disconcerting rumors about Putin’s mental status are another scary factor—he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union and none of Europe can let him do that. Terrible times.

There’s a distance—I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe a disconnect between the destruction and suffering and amazing heroism in Ukraine and my life as I sit here in my cottage, visiting with good friends, eating a good supper. This morning in church Dr. Peterman talked about what Celtic cultures call the “thin places,” those places where heaven and earth seem to meet for rare moments. This is not a thin place. It’s like those supposed-fingerling potatoes—at thick place like a clumsy thumb. For me, it’s prayer time. For you there may be another answer. For all of us, I urge you to support President Biden and his heroic efforts to curb Russia. And cheer and pray for President Zelensky, the hero who is leading Ukraine and who does not appear to flinch. Mask mandates, truck convoys, “freeduhms,”—pfft!