This is a test of the ability to send a picture to the blog from my mobile...
03 April 2011
What's on in the Kitchen Today?
Rich's co-worker Kim has a birthday tommorrow so I made her a gloriously bright lemon cake (left) to keep my cake baking skill sharp. And tonight's dinner are thick rib pork chops, bone in, with sauteed kale and pureed (mashed) parsnips....
Later. End of day. It's been a long one. Dinner turned out great, pork chops came out with a great savory crust while remaining moist and flavorful. Didn't quite have enough parsnips or kale so I supplemented the parsnips with white carrots from the CSA and the kale with some apple, also from the CSA. Both were delicious. Dinner was late though, I never remember that the first time I make anything always takes longer than I think it will.
I am tired enough now that I wonder why I do it. Surely someone in my current physical state could find something better to do with his spare time than heat egg yolks, sugar and lemon juice to 170 degrees to make lemon curd or rub salt into pork chops. I don't guess I know the answer. Mark Twain once noted that work is anything a body is obliged to do and play is anything a body is not obliged to do. Well unless we are wealthy enough to hire a cook or to go out to eat for every meal, all of us are obliged to cook sometime so cooking, food preparation, will always be "work" from some perspective - including mine.
But even as its work, for me its the sort of work that is about 180 degrees away from my weekday job, which frankly involves a lot of gathering of information, processing it with my little gray cells (as perhaps Hercule Poirot) and spitting it back out again. By contrast today I have practiced chemistry to give me a cake with a tight crumb and satiny softness, physics in getting egg whites to whip up correctly in the cake frosting, and still more chemistry in getting salt rubbed onto the surface of a pork chop to flavor the whole chop. Plus I have worked with my hands, been standing instead of sitting and have had the added satisfaction of having someone else eat what I have prepared and moan in appreciation. That seems like a pretty good trade to me. Besides, if you are going to cook anyway, why not do it right?
One of pet peeves is Bisquick, the dry ingredient mixture you can buy in a box and use to make biscuits, pancakes or whatever. I mean, look at a list of ingredients in Bisquick. The ones you can pronounce are all readily available in your store for not a lot of money and do you really want to eat the ones you can't pronounce? And if you can buy a box of Bisquick, bring it home, follow its directions to make biscuits, you can make your own biscuits yourself without the mix. And you will teach yourself a new skill. And you might tempted next time to try something different with your biscuits and come out with something unique, completely yours and delicious. All because you decided to do your own cooking and not to just eat out of a box.
So, off the soapbox. Hope everyone had a good weekend and I will write more soon.
Carlyle Stepping Up Its Food
Carlyle, then called the Carlyle Grand, came to Shirlington before Shirlington even really existed, and the large restaurant with its lower level bar and more casual dining and white tablecloth upper floor has long been known as a venue for special occasion or expense account dining.
But the restaurant had also become known for steadily good but not very interesting fare. There are times of year when, before the economic crisis, it was not unusual for representives of different firms or organizations to invite me to lunch of dinner. Since I worked out of the condo for secven or so years before having to move to an office downtown, Carlyle was often the vcnue for these meals and within a few weeks I felt like I had had most of their really well prepared food and gradually I stopped going there unless I was on business.
I broke that habit with Rich on Friday when, on an impulse, we decided to give the lower level at Carlyle a go before the play and we were really glad we did.
While the basic menu really has not changed very much, Carlyle has stepped up on both its innovation and quality of food preparation. The innovation came early in the meal when we both had an unusual appetizer salad. The salad was a mixture of greens but with a slight preponderance of those that I have a slightly tart or bitter taste balanced with some grapes to bring a sweeter taste and with some very thinly sliced (I mean very thinly, almost shaved) old style, very salty country ham. This had then been seared so that each small piece was a little crunchy but retained that salty ham taste - but not nearly as strongly as it would have been if it had been a full slice.
About a cup to a cup and half of this salad, dressed with a slightly sweet wine vinigrette, took up hte center of the appetizer plate, surrounded by three very lightly breaded and fried oysters. I mean very lightly - no taste of grease or too much oil clumping up too much breading, just the sweet brine of the oysters as they shared our palates with the salad. It was really good and completely unexpected.
Rich had he special entree, a grilled haddock with cauliflower that had been mashed and pureed to resemble mashed potatoes. The haddock was prepared really terrifically, grilled just to the right place where the flesh of the fish melts on your tongue soon after you put in into your mouth leaving behind a ghost of its former flavor. Cauliflower masquerading as mashed potatoes lost its novelty a while back, but Carlysle managed to keep this train going with a nice mixture of lemon and garlic in the cauliflower - not enough to overwhelm, just enough to give the haddock something to play against.
I had one of their big salads with a fillet of grilled salmon on it for my entree. Usually, this is pretty pedestrian but I wanted to hold down cost as Rich's entree came in at $22.00. But the quality of the grilled salmon surprised me . I had ordered it rare, and it came just perfect with a nice crusty exeterior but a cool interior and it was really good.
We wanted to linger a bit before heading down the street to the theater so we each had a nicely foamed cappacinno and shared a piece of lemon merangue pie for dessert. This was also terrific, with a bright tart lemon curd and an almost marshmellowly merangue topping that I wondered if they had not actually baked but had instead browned with a kitchen torch. All in all a very good meal.
One thing though, while Carlyle has stepped up its food, the prices have risen too. Our meal with appetizer, entree, dessert and coffee came in $40.00 per person with tax but without tip, and with no alcohol. I know some folks will find this on the inexpensive side, but others won't and I think its always good to be prepared.
02 April 2011
Art. Or Why Have Friends at All?
Last night, Rich and I went to see the latest offering over at Signature. It's called Art and its billed as a comedy - which it is, although maybe in the mysterious tradition which allowed the French to find Jerry Lewis funny.
No, that comment was too harsh. It was better than that, but carried a little 'spoonful of sugar' quality, in that the playwrite, Yasmina Reza, used humor to mask her introduction of serious ideas. She made me laugh while smuggling in concepts that left me unable to fall back to sleep at 3:00 AM. Reza is French - of Iranian and Hungarian parents. (Wonder what her families dinner tables were like?)
Ostensibly, Art relates the tale of Marc, Serge and Yvon, three middle-aged French men, living in a metropolitan area (likely Paris, but never specified) and the rather spectacular conflict they share over a piece of art. But actually, the play is about friendship. Why we choose the friends we do and vice versa, what they mean to us and vice versa and whether they have value or meaning outside of the context of our lives.
(This not in an absolute sense, as in every man endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights, but in the subjective, knowable sense. Think that old chestnut about whether that tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it. Do our friends have value in our lives if we have lost so much contact that we no longer recognize each other? How much do our freinds define us and how much should be we let them?)
Serge's purchase, at the princely sum of 200,000 Francs of a five foot by four foot canvas with what appears to be a white background upon which may or may not be painted a series of white diagonal lines is what sparks all this.
Marc is an extremely linnear thinker who prides himself on being something of a maverick and an eccentric and could likely carry the label of a 'cultural conservative" today - though nothing in the play is explictly political. He simply cannot understand or accept that Serge might actually like a piece of art which, in Marc eyes, seems at best an example of art fraud and at worst "a piece of shit." Serge's purchase and delight with this painting crystalizes for Mark the way he feels Serge has become a different man than the one he has known for 15 years - and what he percieves as a loss hurts and grieves him.
Serge, on the other hand, has contracted, somwhat, the virus of cultural snobbery and feels rejected in Marc's mockery of the painting and his inability to at least be happy that he is happy with the purchase.
Yvon spends the play trying to mediate between the two until it becomes very clear that neither of the other two have been real friends to him. Yvon, in many ways, is the most human and humane character in the play - consistantly bringing the other two back from whatever intellectual battlefield they share to the nuts and bolts of living.
So - no spoilers here for those who want to see it. Just the questions it left with me. How much does any of us know about why we chose our friends or they chose us? It's axiomatic that no one is perfect so we all have to tolerate some degree of imperfection in our friends as they must with us. But who sets the balance that says we will accept just this much of so-and-so's specific behavior or attitude, but no more? And does that balance change over time? And if it is changing, do we owe our friends and ourselves the chance of fix it or renegotiate it?
I can think of several long term and deep friendships in my life and the lives of friends and family which have died. Some of the friendships died slowly and almost like the two parties had each placed a do not resucisitate sign at the end of the patient's bed. But two or three them died precepitously - in ways that, when I look back on them, suggests they had filled with dry rot over time much like a tree will so that when the really strong wind came they could not take it and instead collapsed.
I think friendships have to be renegotiated over time. People change - and we change our friends as they change us - and sometimes only then break off friendship. Some of these things are almost stereotypes. Two alcoholics who support each other in deep friendship as they begin to live sober - only to find that really don't get along as well sober as they did while they drank. I guess what I came away with was a deeper appreciation of my friends and a willingness to do the work to nurture and grow them. The lessons that I guess Marc and Serge forgot and had to re-learn....
