Quotables

Time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the United States time is the altar.

- Roger Cohen

Food Poem Fridays: Barbara Crooker's VEGETABLE LOVE

Vegetable Love by Barbara Crooker

Feel a tomato, heft its weight in your palm,
think of buttocks, breasts, this plump pulp.
And carrots, mud clinging to the root,
gold mined from the earth's tight purse.
And asparagus, that push their heads up,
rise to meet the returning sun,
and zucchini, green torpedoes
lurking in the Sargasso depths
of their raspy stalks and scratchy leaves.
And peppers, thick walls of cool jade, a green hush.
Secret caves. Sanctuary.
And beets, the dark blood of the earth.
And all the lettuces: bibb, flame, oak leaf, butter-
crunch, black-seeded Simpson, chicory, cos.
Elizabethan ruffs, crisp verbiage.
And spinach, the dark green
of northern forests, savoyed, ruffled,
hidden folds and clefts.
And basil, sweet basil, nuzzled
by fumbling bees drunk on the sun.
And cucumbers, crisp, cool white ice
in the heart of August, month of fire.
And peas in their delicate slippers,
little green boats, a string of beads,
repeating, repeating.
And sunflowers, nodding at night,
then rising to shout hallelujah! at noon.

All over the garden, the whisper of leaves
passing secrets and gossip, making assignations.
All of the vegetables bask in the sun,
languorous as lizards.
Quick, before the frost puts out
its green light, praise these vegetables,
earth's voluptuaries,
praise what comes from the dirt.

Light Summer Meals: Salmon Niçoise and Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Chipotle-Honey Dressing

Ah, summer. You don't feel like spending a lot of time in a hot kitchen and you barely feel like eating anything remotely warm. The tomatoes are delicious and everything seems more colorful. So we have been having simple dinners, basically salads topped with fish or shrimp:


Salmon "Niçoise" - Salmon poached in a pandan-galangal-lemon broth, over Satur Farms mache and endive salad dressed in a blood orange-mustard vinaigrette, with a few russet potatoes, steamed baby asparagus (which we had saved frozen from spring), heirloom tomatoes from New Jersey, and crumbled hardboiled egg.



Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Chipotle-Honey Dressing (with grilled shrimp glazed with the same chipotle-honey dressing). The salad has diced radish, diced yellow and red bell peppers, diced red onion, diced fresh bicolor corn, and cilantro. I soaked the black-eyed peas in the morning so they would cook more quickly, and boiled them with salt, two bay leaves, and the two dried chipotle peppers that I then made a salad dressing/glaze with (chipotles, a whole head of fresh baby garlic cloves that I lightly roasted, honey, lime juice, salt, a little bit of olive oil and some brown rice vinegar, blended with a hand blender).

Beautiful Summer Bounty

These past two weekends, we have been just outside Geneva, Switzerland to meet a baby, and in the Berkshires to celebrate the wedding of a close friend, whose mother happens to run a small grass-based dairy in Williamstown. Needless to say, we have been sumptuously well-fed, and I had to share.

In Geneva, the most popular coffee drink is the café renversé (I think they have something similar in Israel called the cafe hafuch). It is basically a latte, except the espresso is put into the hot steamed milk instead of the other way around - hence, "reversed coffee," or, in the Hebrew, "upside down coffee". It is hard to be a big coffee drinker here in the U.S. where you don't find much good stuff, but I could have a café renversé every day if I lived in Geneva.

Just outside Geneva, where we were staying with our friends, we were picking fruit from the orchard...

...spreading homemade preserves on fresh French bread...

...and having tarte aux abricots speckled with lavender from the garden.

In Williamstown, the cheese made on the premises was the focal point during the cocktail hour after the wedding ceremony. Served alongside sun-warmed green figs, with a mildly acidic, palate-cleansing white wine, Maggie's Round (named after the family's dog, who's developed a taste for it) is the kind of cheese you can keep nibbling throughout a summer evening and never feel the need for anything else or a proper meal. It's an Italian farm-style raw milk cheese, aged 2-4 months, with a flavor similar to Italian Toma.