I wrote yesterday that I was going to making tuna melts for no reason. I now know the reason. I have a lot of tuna salad. Instead of making a melt tonight, I decided to have a simple tuna salad sandwich on the bread which was as amazingly fresh today as it was yesterday when I baked it. It was so soft and chewy, made with fine ground red wheat flour, bread flour, buttermilk, and honey. I’ve also discovered that slicing the bread in uniform sandwich thickness is quite easy. The bread tastes fresher sliced to need. There have been better things since sliced bread.
Tuna salad is another thing which settles with a night in the fridge. It doesn’t last much longer however. The tuna in this salad is a herring, if you will, for the dish’s true star ingredient, celery. There was once a wonderful produce market near the Church St. MUNI stop in San Francisco. Among its many wonders was the most beautiful, young, pale green celery I’ve ever eaten. I once took a bunch of this celery to a friend’s party and MY were they skeptical when I produced, if you will, my contribution to the antipasti. Well, look who’s laughing now! Seriously, celery is good and important in many things, and if you want to the make the world a better place with regards to love and appreciation of celery, you peel it on its arched back. You’ll be glad you did, and the kids will eat it up like gangbusters, perhaps.
The tuna is tuna. Canned tuna. Water packed, in this instance.
What an amazing word. A word we all know what means even though the word itself doesn’t suggest the object it represents. Sandwich. Whenever I hear this word or read it, I feel like eating a sandwich. Saying the word sandwich gives the same mouth feel of eating one. I can hear my fourth grade teacher saying the word SANDWICH very slowly, very deliberately. Or my dad, mouth half full nodding his head. “That’s a pretty good sandwich” he’d say, and he really knows from sandwiches. Sandwiches.
That is a picture of a sandwich. A tuna melt to be exact. My goal over the next few days will be to nail the Tuna Melt, for no particular reason. Here is the buttermilk bread I made before the sandwich was made.
This bread is so tasty and sturdy; it’s the best for sandwiches. It’s very simple to make too. I’ll tell ya about it.
I did it, I ate the cake. It was simply amazing, and I’m sorry if I was, you know, complaining about anything. The cake was dense and short bready, and the meringue was light and crisp and the pecans added made it seem like a brittle. The strawberry whipped cream was literally the icing on the cake, and it was absolutely amazing. The dessert was amazing. And yes, the biscuits were amazing, the corn and tomato salad was also amazing. The food was delicious, and gone.
Like a dried out Christmas tree in your fridge, days old desserts are a poignant reminder of the inevitability of decay. The end of all joy, innocence and youth. That sweet fluffy cloud of whipped cream with seasonal strawberries at the height of flower on Sunday is now deflated, craggy, withered. The berries have turned bitter and are weeping. The whipped cream is toppled rubble like a grand, old, movie palace after the wrecking ball.
Salads and desserts have the shortest shelf life of any foods. By salad I mean the typical American green salad with lettuce and chopped carrots and other crap. Salads should not be kept. I notice at meals made for family and friends there is an occasional insistence that there be “something green” on the plate. It is healthy, and it assuages any guilt caused by the other ingredients in the meal. I notice, however, that guests usually only take one or two leaves of greenery as a kind of garnish. They nibble at it, but mostly the salad is there for show. At the end of the evening, when the ritual of leftover storage takes place, some helpful person will try to store the salad because it is claimed that this salad will be delicious later on. Perhaps they don’t understand that your salad is in a state of decay and will not be desirable after tonight. A dressed salad will not last the evening, it must be thrown out. It doesn’t get better than this, friends. If you want a salad tomorrow, make it tomorrow. Tell the truth. You don’t want to eat this salad. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
Desserts are slightly more tricky. People don’t pretend to like desserts, they do. They think that they will want to eat it later. Sometimes, they are right. How about cake? Puddings? Hmmm…..what else? Ice Cream? There’s not much that keeps. Maybe some cookies. Most pies, pastries, and breads don’t improve at all with age. Pastry must be crisp and do her dance.
So this moment has come for our dear Strawberry Meringue Cake. There isn’t much left at all, but it is no longer worth the calories for flavor. The kitchen is emptying out. I will be away for a couple of weeks, and when I return it will be closer to fall than the beginning of summer. It is good to clean the cupboards, to reset and start over. The summer has been beautiful, and it’s getting time to move on.
Bevelyn, your Strawberry Meringue disappointed no one. It was magnificent. The cake, which in the making was more of a dough than a batter, ended up being a thick, gooey, sweet, eggy bar. Above this, a layer of crispy meringue with toasted pecans gave us richness, nuance, profundity. On top, a fluffy mountain of whipped cream enrobed the macerated strawberries in loving embrace. Everyone enjoyed it heaps, Bevelyn, and for that I thank you.
There it is, gang. This is the post-baked, pre-strawberry whipped cream topping cake. This picture doesn’t quite sizzle and snap the way I hoped it would. I will do a little research on ideal food photography angles and lighting and design and composition. It definitely looks like something your grandma would pull out of the oven. In a good way of course. Some people’s grandmothers pull horrible things out of their ovens. This comparison is not inclusive of them.
The salad with freshly shucked corn, grape tomatoes, lime juice, avocado, and olive oil was really delicious. Corn and lime are a good combo.
Here’s a question topic:
How soon before leaving town ought one to go shopping for fresh food? At what point do we just starting eating out because “I’m going out of town on Thursday”? Monday? I’d think Monday could be the latest. I am going out of town on Thursday.
OK Bevelyn, I think we need to have a little chat. I imagine it’s highly unlikely you read my new blog because at the moment nobody does. So I feel ok to question/criticize your recipe in the spirit that we all only ever want is to eat well. Regardless as to how the cake actually comes out, it will be the feature of my first photograph on my site. Even if it looks like shit.
In about five minutes, I will be pulling the Strawberry Meringue Cake from Country Cakes by Bevelyn Blair out of the oven. I made the cake exactly to her recipe because sometimes with more rustic, self-published, spiral-bound type cookbooks what may at first appear to be mistakes in the recipe may actually be grandma’s secrets at work, and the result is miraculous. So, when Ms. Bevelyn told me to make a cake batter that had only a quarter cup of milk to two and a half of flour, I raised an eyebrow, but thought let’s see how this goes.
Wait a second, wait a second, I just pulled the cake out of the oven, and it looks for all the world like grandma’s secrets are in fact at work. The cake looks beautiful. I must refrain from anymore criticism until the cake goes in my mouth. Silence, Benji.
A kitchen inventory has been taken. All is well, it’s not as bad as I feared. Instead, a menu for Sunday. A friend and I will eat the end of the chicken with one more swipe at dumplings, using yet a third recipe. Even though I made the chicken several days ago, it has kept, nay, improved with each serving. This will finish it off. Also included will be a salad of fresh corn, cherry tomato, scallions, and lime. Finally, a strawberry meringue cake.
For the cake, I am adapting a recipe from Ms. Bevelyn Blair’s Country Cakes. This plastic comb bound book was a gift from a friend who like myself lived in the South for many years. Bevelyn wrote herself a cookbook which the same friend Louis insists is one of the best baking books ever. I have made a number of recipes from it over the years, and he is not wrong. I especially remember a lemon pudding cake that was truly spectacular.
The photograph of Ms. Blair has her sitting on a stool with an enormous slice of frosted layer cake on a plate in her lap. She has a pleasant half smile which made me wonder if she finished proofreading the draft the day of the photo shoot. Her dedicatory note to all the little girls who grow up dreaming of being housewives shoveling cake in the their boys insatiable maws seems dated somehow. But boy, can she write a recipe. What a sweet tooth! What fearless embrace of flavored Jello packets and Dream Whip! What old fashioned values! Her cake is her pride and joy. And ours. Apparently, she has had quite a career as a cookbook author with TV appearances, a Twitter account, and everything.
I pull the cantaloupe out of the fridge. I love melon when it is cold. I knew it wasn’t ripe, it had no smell. It had no smell when I bought it six days ago. I still has no scent. None of the on sale cantaloupe had any scent at the market. And of course, in the post Covid world, handling food in the shop is frowned upon. I must take it home without knowing anything about it, something I’d never do with a person, let alone a summer melon. I cut the melon, nothing. I cut the melon into cubes. I put one in my mouth, and the taste was commensurate with the other sensory experience. Disappointing. I continue to nibble on it, as it’s what’s for breakfast. But the question remains.
Why, in an effort not to waste food, must we contend with occasional bad fruit? If I were hosting brunch I would not have served that cantaloupe. Maybe grind it up in a smoothie or something. How much of cooking is about trying to salvage or make the most of inferior produce? The shame, the guilt of throwing something away because it tasted terrible or was poorly handled or burned or ruined is almost unbearable as kitchen guilts go.
Possible solutions:
Don’t buy it if you can’t smell it. True for tomatoes, melons, cheese
Don’t buy it if you can smell it. True for meat, fish, eggs
Shopping is a very important part of the kitchen keeping process. Know what you are buying and why you are buying it.
Frugality is part of artistry. We are not perfect. When some food is ruined, learn from it and forgive the self for it. Next time, it will be better.
I woke up and looked outside and thought the sky looked strange. I put on my slippers and went out to move the car. Raindrops. Bona fide raindrops, falling from the sky above. Very unusual for August in San Francisco. It is a portent of things to come. Yes, it will be an unusual month for all, methinks. Cooking will bring comfort, cooking will bring adventure, cooking will take us out of our heads, nourish our bodies, lift our spirits.
Last night, a culinary triumph. I must remember that the more I care and tend to the food I am cooking, and remember that the cooking process is the thing that I love about the activity, the better the food will be in the end. Chicken and Dumplings, fit for a king. So, so, so, good.
I find that grocery shopping happens in three tiers. The first, is the everything shop. That is, pantry items, packaged foods that are basically going to be the same and roughly the same price everywhere you go. It doesn’t really matter where the shopping happens. Next is the item shop. Ideally, the way this happens is that you go to the shop open to what might be fresh, available, and affordable. Let’s say short ribs are one sale. Bingo on the short ribs. You take them home, look at what else you have on hand, maybe leaf through a cookbook or online recipes, and you find yourself inspired. Chinese five spice short ribs. Thus we come to the third tier of grocery shopping, the scrap shop.
Now this isn’t meant to intimate that this part of the shopping is unimportant or unnecessary, it is often the most important component, because it includes specialty sauces, or herbs, and vegetables that aren’t normally part of the repertoire as Chinese five spice might be. These types of shopping help avoid a couple of annoyances.
The first is that you can break up the shopping trip (as you should anyway) to avoid schlepping lots of boxes and cans and eggs and delicate fruit and fish all in the same bags. The second is that you will be shopping for ingredients available rather than to the dictates of a recipe. You are also more likely to buy your bread in a bakery, your fish from a monger, your meat from a butcher if you’re actually looking for quality ingredients instead of proximal ones. You’ll find where the best things are.
What you say? Why is this necessary? Because you are worth it, and your food source is important. If you live in a big city you can hopefully walk to a nearby full service grocery. Or have things delivered. If you live on the farm, there is hopefully a natural food source either at yours or your neighbor’s. If you live in the burbs and have to drive down a tumbling boulevard through thick, mercurial traffic to park in a lot half a mile away from the front door of the SuperDuper EasyMart, you should move, that simple.
OK, so what about my adventures? Where will the road take me next, cookingwise speaking. I still have some corn, a few old plums, plenty of pantry stuff. And a few problematic leftovers. There are some leftovers that have no real solution except the compost bin. Like the half serving of last week’s angel hair pasta that had grilled salmon in it which was nearly a week old when I made it. We must learn our lessons and try to do better in the future. Elizabeth David once said, if you are regularly throwing food in the bin then you are a bad cook, full stop.
So, what then, shall I cook? There are still strawberries in the fridge, perhaps a cake of some kind?
I did a quick shuffle of the fridge and the bookshelf. I love cookbooks, I really do.
2 August Tuesday
Another day, fresh dumplings are in order. Chicken and Dumplings, corn on the cob, cantaloupe, strawberry something. The corn is still fresh and pluckin. The dumplings can come together real quick. Fresh strawberry cake? Perhaps. I’m thinking David Tanis Indian Spice Butter on the corn.
Yes, and another new dish- Strawberry Sonker, and the dumplings from New Joy of Cooking.
No Sonker. I ran out of milk. Everything else was wonderful.
3 August Wednesday
Coffee, yes. Strawberries, cantaloupe. A fridge closing in on empty. Bread gone. There is an old, stale baguette in the pantry. Onions. Green Pepper. Flour Tortillas. Maybe a little cheese.
BingoFest 