picniczine-blog

[picniczine-blog]

Sunday Supper

Baba Ghanoush 

Pan-fried dumplings

Kale salad with jalapeno falafel and orange-yogurt dressing

Kiwi caprese 

Peanut butter & jelly cake

[picniczine-blog]

All of my favorite recipes have been borne of stalled subway trains or two-hour traffic jams. Most recently this happened with an idea for a pasta dish in an orange and coffee butter sauce, topped with black pepper and ginger baked ricotta. It came to me as the showstopper in a string of indulgences on one of the days when I have to commute to DC for work. I had softened the blow of a 12-hour day by treating myself to a Five Guys burger and fries for lunch, and had planned to repent later that night with a clean dinner of lime roasted asparagus and grilled eggplant. That idea lasted until I got to my car and found myself needing a compelling reason to stay up later than 7 PM after having woken up at 4:30 that morning.

During my train ride back to Baltimore, I had already begun to waver on the healthy dinner idea, thinking that it couldn’t hurt much to toss the roasted asparagus with some pasta. By the time I got on the road, headed for the grocery store, I was conjuring up a ginger and orange butter sauce to go with it—something citrusy and bright—which is still an idea I quite like. But I was craving something sootier and more bitterly savory. The idea for the coffee in the orange sauce, and the ginger and black pepper ricotta, slowly melding together and saturating a heap of homemade maldafini, popped into my brain after a fevered series of revisions that didn’t jettison the asparagus until the final iteration.

When I hit on it, and had my white t-shirt premonition, while crawling along I-695 with the sun roof open and windows down, I was so excited by the idea, could so nearly taste it, that I almost pulled over on the side of the highway to make my grocery list and ensure that I didn’t forget anything. I felt a rush as I pulled into a parking spot in front of the store—I love to grocery shop, any time, for any reason, but most especially in fulfillment of a spontaneous, to-be-savored supper, something I used to do much more often when I lived in New York. In the check-out line, the haul of produce, coffee, cheese, and chocolate that had fit so neatly into my basket, now cheerfully and colorfully organized on the conveyor belt, gave me a deep sense of well-being, tinged with shame for so often taking my own food security for granted.

Outside it was bright and sunny and warm enough to not need a jacket for the walk through the parking lot, which felt like a miracle in the midst of a never-ending winter. I stopped by the liquor store for a couple of bottles of chianti, one of which I would consume almost in full later. Heading back to my car, life felt more voluptuous and full than it has any right to be on a Wednesday night. When I got home I shed my bags, slid into slippers, poured myself a kiddie cup of wine, and preheated the oven for the asparagus, which had been relegated to something to pluck from the cooling rack and chow down on while my experiment was underway.

I arranged the stems on a baking sheet, chopped some garlic to sprinkle over, along with salt and pepper, drizzled on some olive oil, and tossed them a bit before putting them in the oven. Then I took a separate knob of garlic, trimmed the top, wrapped it in foil, and flooded it with olive oil, before sticking it in the oven with the asparagus. While those cooked (the asparagus for 12 minutes, the garlic for 40), I started the ricotta—measuring out about a cup of the whole milk variety, and bombarding it with black pepper and freshly grated ginger. I transferred it to a ramekin after mixing it thoroughly, and when both the garlic and asparagus were done, turned down the heat on the oven and baked it for about 12 minutes. While they were still hot, I squeezed the juice of a lime over the asparagus stems, tossed them one last time, and burned my fingers not being able to wait to snack on one. In the meantime, I had also zested the whole of a large orange and squeezed as much of the juice as I could get from it into a small pan. To that I added a little less than a tablespoon of ground espresso roast coffee and a stick of butter, and simmered it all together on the stove while I boiled some good pasta I splurged on for the occasion. I settled for dried rigati for this because I didn’t have a choice, but the recipe is meant for freshly made maldafini—tangled, sultry ribbons that grab the sauce and melt into it just a bit.

When the rigati was ready, I tossed it in a big, deep bowl with a couple of the roasted garlic cloves, chopped up. I poured over the light, slightly grainy, buttery brown sauce and added two healthy dollops of the baked ricotta and some chopped pistachios. The result was heaven. The flavors were challenging, and rich and balanced—spiking and offsetting one another simultaneously. It was a vixen of a dish.

The experience of making it brought me down to earth, and grounded me in some much needed spontaneous creativity. Cooking is my fail-safe way to decompress, and on weeknights I often feel comforted by the familiarity and repetition of making the same thing—or variations of the same thing—a couple meals in a row. But there’s something slightly stunning and otherworldly about feeling inspiration strike so suddenly, even, or maybe especially, for something as simple as a weeknight dinner. Following that impulse—spending an evening hopscotching around the kitchen, drinking wine, and listening to music as the sun melts into the horizon outside, when it would be so easy to otherwise get bogged down by the endless responsibilities of adult life, is heaven itself. Especially when the end result is delicious and nourishing.

I’ve had some trouble putting it into words, but the idea for this recipe was inspired by dirt—as cosplayed by black pepper and ground coffee, and more poetically symbolized by ginger root. It was inspired by the oozing smell of mulch that has begun to permeate my neighborhood, by the perfume that I splurged on this week to smell of hazelnut and tobacco on slow-burning, wicked summer nights. It was inspired by a decision recently made, and still wobbly, to stay put for a while, maybe even indefinitely. To confront being back in the place where I’m from, a place that I have a pattern of fleeing, surrounded by a big family that I am now an adult member of, and a lot of muddy feelings about the joy and responsibility of that.

[picniczine-blog]

Today I desperately wanted to feel full, but I never did.

I felt filmy—I didn’t brush my hair or wash my face or get dressed in an approximation of personality.

I procrastinated the entire day—procrastination being one of my deepest rooted tendencies, and one that brings me a good deal of shame. Most days, I can climb up out of it, punish myself into forgetting it by the end of the day, but not tonight.

Tonight all I have to remind me of myself are oranges and coffee, and spicy raw onion slices on Ritz crackers. Cooking is a balm, now more than ever. It’s where my sense of self starts and ends most days. Tonight, there isn’t much time for it, due to said procrastination. But I take an hour for myself (it will be two by the time I finish writing this) and use it as an opportunity to keep some food from going to waste—one of my favorite accomplishments.

I pour myself chianti in one of the kiddie cups I keep for my nephews and nieces. On the stove I fry up some sliced mango bbq chicken sausage in butter. At the counter I unevenly dice up the last third of an onion I’ve been saving. Using the knife, I portion off a small pile to eat on top of salty, buttery Ritz crackers—a favorite treat that grants me temporary relief at being single. The remaining onion goes into the sausage grease after I transfer the browned meat to a plate, along with some chopped up oyster mushrooms leftover from a brothy ginger, chili and sage soup I made and bottled up a week ago. I only just now remember that there’s still two jars of it in my fridge.

In another pot I wilt the dregs of a bag of kale with grated ginger and garlic powder—slightly burning the edges because my temperamental gas-range stove only has two speeds. While the stir-ins cook, I scrape a bit of mold off some leftover black beans, and spoon them into a bowl, leaving just enough to spread on a buttermilk biscuit for breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ve reached peak biscuit—the perfect ratio of buttermilk to whole milk ricotta, the utmost in savory with the combination of green olives, jalapeño, parmesan cheese and black pepper—and have lost all self-control when it comes to them.

While I cook, baby feet skitter across the floor of the apartment above me, creating a constant, welcome background noise that makes me feel like weeping.

The beans get nuked in the microwave at the last minute, before I stir in the kale, the sausage, the onions and mushrooms, some walnuts toasted on the stove in leftover oil, and a little more grated ginger. The result is hearty, and not entirely satisfying. I make a note in the book I keep on my kitchen counter, in an organizer filled with stray recipes, coupons and plant watering instructions stained with soil—tomorrow when I heat up the last of the beans for my breakfast, to do so on the stove, with some butter, and mushroom broth. I wish I had some sweet potato, and write that down as well.

I remember that I meant to make Laurie Colwin’s “Composed Salad”—raw onion rounds topped with orange slices and chopped green olives, dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper—to go with dinner. I could make it now, but there’s only room for dessert. I draw out this last little bit of my break by making a fresh cup of coffee. I cut myself a triangular slice of homemade olive oil orange cake, and briefly toy with sticking it in the broiler for a few minutes to get it toasty and slightly crisped. Maybe if I had some ice cream to melt onto it.

I sit at my kitchen counter, on the stool I keep there because I prefer it to eating by myself at the table, and wash my cake down with black coffee, feeling smug at the amendments I made to the recipe. The one I based my cake off of called for the orange to be blended with the olive oil, peel and all. I haven’t gotten around to buying a new blender yet, but besides that despise cleaning them. For my own cake I used thin-skinned clementines and diced them finely with their peels, simmering them on the stove in the olive oil so that they would break down a bit before I added them to the batter. The result is a flavorful, not too sweet cake that has what I like to think of as an adult texture. It makes me think of Sicily, or at least what I imagine Sicily to be.

It’s Monday night, and I have possibly a whole week of failing to feel full ahead of me. But I have a plan in place. The beans and biscuit breakfast, the mushroom soup that I just remembered and “Composed Salad” I forgot tonight for lunch tomorrow (one that feels very elegant to me). Menus have always been a form of practicable optimism.