Consolation
by wjw on April 16, 2020
Here’s the Moroccan-spice-crusted leg of lamb I cooked for Passover/Easter/Bunnyday, served with a saffron rice pilaf and fresh artichokes with a saffron dipping sauce. (The Moroccan spices on the lamb had saffron too, so thanks to the wonderful Patricia Rogers for dropping that saffron on me.)
It is small consolation that in our Fortress of Solitude we get to cook this sort of thing for ourselves, but we’ll take what consolation we can. Kathy made chicken cacciatore the other night, and right now I’m cooking beef brisket sous vide for 72 hours, to appear as BBQ on Saturday night.
We’ve had seafood quiche, spiral ham, pork tenderloin, omelettes made with fresh eggs bought from a neighbor, breakfast burritos, and Finnish pancakes. We’re emptying out our garage freezer, and I don’t put cheap food in the freezer.
The weird thing is that I’m losing weight. Even though our dishes aren’t all low in calories, they’re cooked properly and without all the butter and other fats slathered on food in restaurants, then served with high-carb sides. Normally I eat in restaurants a lot. Now I don’t.
I may have to get used to not eating in restaurants, because I doubt that many local restaurants will survive the epidemic. The only places left will be chain restaurants, and most of those serve homogenized bland food I don’t care to eat.
I’m really missing New Mexican food. I never learned to cook it because it was always cheap and available. I’ll call around and see if anyone’s doing takeaway, and just hope for the best.
In the meantime I’ll take what gastric consolation I may.
I am glad you can get the ingredients. I am mostly down to rice beans and lots of frozen vegetables. Then again, I have not been in the same room as another person sense February 7th. I think I might be going a bit crazy. The invisible pink zebra that is sitting on my living room couch says, I am fine. I don’t know if I trust her, she is conspiring with the cannibal elves that want to make me into a pasta salad.
What were we talking about? I remember, I am not having any isolation issues at all. I am perfectly sane. How about you?
On a totally unrelated note:
I was getting a bit shaggy before the lock down. Now I look like a cross between Rasputin and Rob Zombie. I should probably plan to shave sometime before January.
Walter –
What better time for you to learn how to do New Mexican food? Not that it’ll be all that good to begin with, but you can probably find all the ingredients there. We’ve got a drive-through farmer’s market where we live, and it’s possible to score lots of early greens and veg (mmm, ramps), along with a variety of meats. I’ll bet with a few phone calls you can find whatever you need, and then devote yourself to developing a new skill-set. By the time lock-down is over, you’ll have the beginnings of a new cooking style, and you can move on from there. And then summer will be here, and you can go wild. Glass half full, man, glass half full!
pixlaw, Just so you know, if Mr Williams ever decided to give up writing, he could probably we a world class chef. At a minimum, he could probably run a very respectable food travel blog.
I know he can compete with the best when it comes to cooking for small groups of people. I don’t know if he has the experience to produce food in the volumes necessary to run a commercial establishment.
Ralf –
It doesn’t surprise me that this is so, just from the pix on this blog. I’m just trying to encourage him to, you know, expand his repertoire. Remember, fusion cuisine is the hottest new style of the (*checks notes*) 1980s.
Tritium deuterium fusion cuisine was hot in back in the 1980’s. WJW is doing helium-3 fusion.
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