Cooking for the Flu-ish and Ennui-Stricken

May 6, 2009 · 1 comment


I’m not one to get my knickers in a twist over news reports, so when I started feeling oddly feverish and generally woozy the other day, I did not jump to conclusions about having Swine Flu. (Although one of my more hysterical colleagues nearly doused me with Purell when I announced I was going home.)  


What is it about Springtime that does this to so many people? We get sniffles, colds, ordinary and undefinable malaise; we have to sleep, we have to take Advil, we get strangely misty for no reason, and suddenly, we crave baby food. Not baby food as in Beechnut; baby food as in “nursery” food–stuff that goes down easy, that’s simple to digest, that makes you feel safe, rather than sick and cranky, and that invariably turns out to be very inexpensive. In my house, we call this Pudding Time, which is what happens when Susan walks around carrying a blanket that her grandmother made about fifty years ago, settles down on the couch, and I ask her if she wants anything.

“Yes,” she sighs. “I think it’s Pudding Time….”  

Once, when I lived in Manhattan and Susan took ill in my apartment after a very fancy and vertical meal at 5757, she instructed me to go get her some pudding, but the 24 hour Smiler’s grocery downstairs didn’t sell it prepackaged. I spied a commercial-sized vat of the stuff in the deli case next to a shrink-wrapped, boneless industrial turkey, and said to the small man who worked there, “I want that.” He sold the whole thing to me for ten dollars (not cheap, but large enough to serve twenty or thirty). Because when it’s Pudding Time, Susan has to have pudding, no matter what. 

But Pudding Time is only a moniker representative of a universal situation; it can also mean that you want chicken soup with dumplings, or pastina, or some softly cooked eggs and buttered toast. On the flipside, though, and for reasons that I can’t fathom, I rose from my sick bed last night to make Steak Diane, which was a very bad idea indeed and does not at all fall into the Pudding Time repertoire. Generally, though, when I get sick or sad or my constitution just needs a little bit of love, my food of choice usually tends to be very spicy Indian food–often dal and rice, the former made from a divine recipe in Suvir Saran‘s first cookbook. I used to think this was very strange, but an Iranian doctor once told me that it made sense; turmeric is used all over India to calm colicky babies. Who knew. 

Today, when I called my office to tell them I wouldn’t be coming in, they asked me, exactly, what was wrong. The question really forced me to think about it, and I realized that I’ve been stricken by far more than just a weird, flu-like illness that has turned my pallor green; today, I ran headlong into the very real, very chilling truth that not everyone understands the difference between agreeing to disagree, and hatred; and the fact that colloquial hatred–that pass-the-ketchup, dinnertime chat that results in it being okay for children to learn to hate people because they’re black/Jewish/gay/Muslim/short/tall/fill-in-the-blank–is all around us, all the time.  On this day, I was saddened by the probable end of a long association that went belly up on account of peace and politics, orientation and anxiety, and lack of acceptance on the part of someone who truly believes herself to be something she isn’t. After a lot of time going back and forth, and talking and talking, I realized that there is a profound difference between saying that you’re something, and actually, really, honestly, being it. It’s like when the NRA says that they’re all for non-violence; or when Anita Bryant said she’s all for love; or when factory farmers say that they’re really treating animals humanely. But no matter what we say or do, or say and do, we have to remember that hate is hate is hate, that we all have to watch for it and monitor it, and just because we’re not immediately engaged with it, we cannot wash our hands of responsibility. Ever.

And so, it became Pudding Time for me pretty quickly. Funnily enough, I made that British favorite: soft-boiled eggs and soldiers, the latter of which is buttered toast sliced into pieces narrow enough to be dunked into the soft, delicately salted yolk. This was our pre-nap lunch, and after snoozing for a while, I felt well enough to think about planning dinner: it will be Jook–that rice porridge with chicken and green onions that has soothed the souls of millions. Tonight, that soul will be mine.

Soft-Boiled Eggs with Soldiers
Serves 1-2

4 eggs at room temperature
4 slices of good quality white bread
unsalted butter

1. Bring a medium saucepan filled with water to a boil. In the meantime, using a pin, poke a small hole in the wide end of each egg (this will prevent the egg from cracking during cooking). When the water is boiling, carefully place the eggs in the pan, cover, and set your timer for 4 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, toast the bread until golden. Remove, butter well, stack the bread, and slice lengthwise into 4 narrow “soldiers.”

3. Remove the eggs, place each one wide-bottom up in the shallow end of an egg cup (place the other one underneath it’s “skirt” to keep warm), and snip off the the top of the egg (I use an egg topper). Serve immediately, with kosher salt. 

Ramps or Lilies: It’s Anyone’s Guess!

May 1, 2009

Ramps, quail eggs, and bread: the makings for a simple Spring supper.


I grew up in Manhattan–actually Forest Hills, which is a ten minute subway ride from Manhattan, if you’re on the express train. We didn’t have a whole lot of nature there, per se, beyond Forest Park, Kissena Park, and Flushing Meadow Park, all of which were officially off limits, because of Son of Sam. 

So, my experience in the great outdoors was sharply limited to seven summers at Camp Towanda, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The food at camp, by any standards, was stellar; we had an outstanding chef named Bill Alexander (who came to us from Yale) who made things like London Broil, and pizza, and pepper steak. When I tell this to my partner, who went to a camp called Happy Hill, she usually ends my waxing rhapsodic by telling me about having to blow the fly carcasses off the hamburgers she’d cook over a leaking propane grill just outside her flammable nylon tent, the summer that she was seven. 

Anyway, one year at Camp Towanda, we had this guy on staff who was hired to run the nature den and to take us all on hikes. His name was Henry, or Hirsch, or something like that, and he was a rather doughy fellow, and pretty much what you’d get if you crossed Euell Gibbons with Newman from Seinfeld. One day, Nature Guy, who wore torn clothes from Kreeger’s and an old Army shirt with his name tag suspiciously ripped in half, took us on a hike through the perilous hills just beyond the camp boundaries. It was thrilling to hear him say things like “see kids, that’s a scrub-oak Lycidium, which is the Latin name for Acorn Bush” and “if you eat the flowering bud of the Pennsylvania Swamp Mug, you’ll be protected from mosquitos for an entire season!” 

We were transfixed by his knowledge, even though he was lying through his teeth.

One day, he took us out to look for some edibles. This was something of a conundrum for me, since we had perfectly good edibles back in the dining hall, for which our parents had paid $1200 for us to eat for eight weeks. But Nature Guy wanted to show us that you could eat straight from the forest floor, and subsist on some pretty wondrous stuff. We watched with rapt attention, but he had no takers when he asked if we wanted to try a mysterious purple flower that looked much like a Venus Fly Trap. I’ll never know what it was for sure, but Nature Guy disappeared from camp the next day. We never saw him again.

I suppose this is why the idea of foraging for my own food has always been a little bit fraught for me. Maybe it’s because my idea of foraging involves making it to the olive bar at Fairway without getting elbowed in the head. I mean, what if you innocently go out to stalk the wild asparagus, and instead wind up stalking poison oak? 

This is not good for my people. We don’t forage. We shop. 

And so a few weeks ago, when the sun began to shine a bit more brightly, Susan called from her office to tell me that she was bringing home a surprise: the two huge bunches of ramps that she got at a really good price ($2.99) were not it, though. What was? Quail eggs and a loaf of Sullivan Street Pain Pugliese. She had splurged, and we put together a delightful early Spring meal of sauteed ramps on garlic toast, topped with poached quail eggs. 

Ramps and fried quail eggs on garlic toast: a nice meal.

The next night, we seared heavily salted-and-peppered chicken, and served it with ramps that I’d cooked together with some pancetta that we had kicking around in the fridge. 

Render the pancetta first, then add the chopped ramp stems.

Add the ramp tops, toss, and cook them down to a tangle.


Salt, pepper, chicken, ramps, dinner.

It was right then that we decided how lucky the folks down in West Virginia must be, to have ramps growing all over God’s green earth in the middle of forests and lawns everywhere in that state. And we bemoaned the fact that since they can’t be propagated, they show up in (usually specialty) food shops at utterly ridiculous prices, just like truffles ($2.99 was a fluke; the next day, the ramps were $9.99 a pound).

A few days later, Susan took our dog out for a walk and came back beaming. 

“I’m not sure,” she said, subversively, “but the neighbors over on the next street seem to have ramps growing near their front yard. They look like the same things I bought at Whole Foods last week.”

“Impossible,” I responded, looking up from the paper, “they must be lilies. Did you try one?”

“Hell no,” she said. “They could be lilies, like you said.” 

“Ramps don’t just grow in suburban Connecticut,” I told her. “They’re a rare edible delicacy that’s limited to the wiles of upstate New York, West Virginia, and, probably, Berkeley, where Alice Waters wills them to grow, like the Amazing Kreskin bending a spoon.” 

Still, I was incredulous. I mean, what if these were in fact ramps? That delicious, spicy-sweet, oniony harbinger of Spring, the short life-spanned wild leek that thumbs its nose at vegetable gardeners everywhere who have tried, and failed, to grow them. We would go over to the house around the corner. We would pull a few up. We would nibble. We would pray they weren’t lilies. 

But there was one catch: I would be breaking my own foraging rule set in stone the day that Nature Guy didn’t show up at morning lineup at Camp Towanda, the day after he had eaten the fly trap. Plus, I would be removing something from my neighbor’s property without him knowing it, and there are very basic rules about that. 

Still. Ramps? $9.99 a pound at Whole Foods. Or free, from my neighbor’s yard. I was willing to take a risk. We drove over and left the car running, in case we had to make a quick getaway. A concerned neighbor drove by and got out, while we were on our hands and knees, pulling.

“What the hell are you two doing? It’s like watching Lucy and Ethel.”
“Shhh! They’re ramps!”
“What the hell are ramps,” she asked.
“Extraordinarily delicious harbingers of springtime that grow wild and cannot be propagated and are a fortune to buy in stores. Try one,” I said, pulling one up.

“Those aren’t ramps,” she said. “Don’t you know lilies when you see them?”

Lucky for us, she was wrong. 

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

indiebound

 

©2009, ©2010, Poor Man's Feast. All rights reserved. To reprint any content herein, including recipes and photography, please contact rights@poormansfeast.com