by Kate Christensen | Sep 9, 2012
When we woke up yesterday morning, there was a chill in the air. The light was simultaneously more muted and more intense than the frank hot brightness of a summer morning, and the air was full of a very familiar, bracing back-to-school feeling. We ate toast with scrambled eggs, dressed a little more warmly than usual, and looked out at the sunlight breaking between clouds that neither billowed nor floated, as they do in the summertime. These clouds meant business. They looked like real weather.
Late in the morning, we set out on “the circle walk,” a 4 or 5 mile loop that starts along an empty, heavily wooded stretch of the road by the lake, then goes left up another, steeper road, then another left onto a dirt road that runs up and over the hill and between two beaver ponds, then yet another left onto another dirt road and over a white wooden fence, and a sharp left down the steep, marshy trail that leads us home. The whole way, we pass through thick, dense old woods. The only sky we see is directly overhead. We usually do a lot of parallel silent thinking on this walk: the terrain is not conducive to chattiness.
This time, though, we brought a covered straw basket with us, not unlike the one Red Riding Hood might have carried to her grandmother. Dingo trotted along just behind or ahead of us, sniffing and peeing and eating grass and trundling along, looking nothing like the wolf. Immediately, we found a patch of trumpetlike mushrooms by the old graveyard. From then on, we were on the scent; we occasionally headed off the road into the woods, on the trail of something neon yellow or otherwise intriguingly funguslike, scrambling over rocks and roots, distracted, then headed back to the road and resumed our walk until something else caught our eye.
“There’s another beer can,” I said. “There’s another one. Another one. There are as many cans as there are mushrooms. Oh my God, another one. Next time we should collect Bud Light cans. Who the hell are these people?” I had an image of a bunch of backwoods yahoos driving along the road throwing empties out their pickup windows and hooting into the quiet air.
“Hey,” said Brendan, heading for a clump of mushrooms. “Look at those.”
We tried to take only one example of everything we found, but couldn’t restrain ourselves if something looked particularly worthy. Walking takes on an entirely new dimension when you’re focused on other things. Back at home, I unpacked the basket and arranged our haul on the granite steps just outside the kitchen door, and then we stood and admired them for a while. We’d found orange horns that looked like tiny Victrola speakers with gills underneath, dead-white penislike obviously toxic deaths’ caps, bright yellow and soft brown clumps of waving fronds that could have come from a coral reef, a bouquet of conjoined, delicate little oyster-colored coins, long slender stems with big flat caps of pale green, pale beige, muted red, gentle yellow, and dirty white, a hobbitlike shaggy “old man of the woods,” and other wonders and curiosities. We couldn’t eat any of them, because we had no real idea what the hell any of them were, but we did feel a certain proprietary satisfaction.
We left them there and went inside and went about our day. In the mid-afternoon, we went to the beach. The road and path and lake were deserted – no cars, no other people, no kayaks or sailboats on the lake. We went in naked and yelped briefly at the water’s sudden chill before we took the plunge. The light was glinting and bleak on the water. The woods loomed all around. The mountains beyond the lake were lit by a peculiar gold-and-silver light through knots of clouds.
We were hungry when we got home. After I took a hot shower and changed into pajamas, I took things out of the fridge and made a sort of New England bouillabaisse: a savory fish stew with carrots, Old Bay, and smoked paprika instead of fennel, orange, and saffron. As the soup simmered, the rain finally came, first lightly, then hard, then harder, and then the wind came, as if it had been an afterthought, and slammed the rain all at once through the east-facing windows so we had to rush around the whole house, closing them.
New England Fish Soup
Mince 1 large onion, 3 medium carrots, 2 celery ribs, and 7 or so garlic cloves. In a big sturdy soup pot, heat a good dollop of oil. When it’s hot, add the vegetables with a dash of Old Bay seasoning, a teaspoon or two, and another of smoked paprika, and stir well. Thinly slice two or three spicy pork sausages, ideally chorizo, and throw them in. Add a dash of salt and another of black pepper. Turn the heat down low and let it all simmer, stirring often, for about half an hour, till everything is soft and melded into an aromatic wad of flavor.
Small-dice 4 small red potatoes. Add them to the pot and stir well. Pour in half a bottle of easygoing, dry white wine: pinot grigio works well. Turn up the heat till it bubbles, then turn down and let it simmer a while until the alcohol has cooked off and it’s reduced a bit.
Add a large can of fire-roasted tomatoes or a jar of very good tomato sauce, and a glass jar of clam juice. Add enough broth – vegetable, fish, or chicken – to cover the solids plus just over an inch. Bring to a boil and turn down and let simmer. Taste, adjust the seasonings, adding more broth as required.
Chop a pound of haddock or other firm white sea fish into bite-sized pieces. Peel and likewise chop ¾ pound of large wild-caught shrimp. Finely chop a bunch of flat-leaf parsley. When it feels like a nearly-finished soup, everything tender and the flavors just right, add the seafood and parsley to the pot and let it simmer, stirring a few times, for 10 more minutes.
Mince 3-4 cloves of garlic. Add them to a bowl with a dollop of good-quality mayonnaise and another of olive oil. Mix this quick aioli together and spread on 2-4 pieces of hot toast and cut them into triangles. Serve with big bowls of soup. Light the kerosene lantern and eat your hot supper while the rain lashes the windows.
by Kate Christensen | Sep 5, 2012
Yesterday, when they announced that our flight to Boston was delayed, Brendan and I headed straight for the tequila and taco place across from our gate. We ordered “skinny” margaritas – tequila and lime juice and simple syrup, but with no Triple Sec or salt, a drink I’ve always called “a margarita without the bullshit” and which has long been one of my all-time favorite cocktails. This one was made with “organic” silver tequila, which made me wonder what pesticides they’re putting on regular agave plants these days.
Outside the huge plate-glass window, guys in vests drove luggage around in little trucks, moving it in and out of planes’ bellies. It looked very, very hot out there. I guessed that our waitress, whose badge identified her as Shelley, was about my age. She had that desert skin – healthy-looking, but tanned and weathered; she might have been half Mexican, but then again, maybe not. I knew she was a native of Arizona because she had that very specific accent, the accent I used to have and almost never hear anymore — when she talked to me and I answered, I suddenly had it again, too. We could have been in the same 6th grade class together, all those years ago. We flirted the way women do when one is drinking tequila with her boyfriend and the other hopes for a good tip.
Whenever I’m back in Arizona, I usually feel a subtle but definite disconnect, an echo of my ancient repudiation of the place, that flat, hot, bright, wide-open desert I never felt at home in as a kid. This time, though, I loved being there. My mother’s big, breezy, bright house on a plateau in the mountain town of Oracle has a smooth herringbone-brick floor and a covered flagstone veranda that runs the length of the triple glass sliding doors. Her front and back gardens are green and full of rosemary shrubs and thriving flowers. Hummingbirds come to rest in the little tree by the feeder and sit absolutely still there. All around are mountains.
During the 6 days I was there, it seems in retrospect, I did nothing but sleep, cook, talk, drink, and eat. Conversations were free-ranging, from serious to silly, always opinionated. I conked out every night well before midnight and slept deeply until 8, then took naps in the afternoons, long, comalike. My sleep was profound, unbroken, the knocked-out, dream-electrified, all-below slumber of an animal in a burrow where no predator can reach it. My mother’s house and presence are safe and restorative; being there this time, I felt myself give in to the torpor, sloth, and heedless sprawl of the summer vacations of my childhood. I felt as if I were a guest at a sort of return-to-the-womb spa.
As always, cooking and eating were the primary shapers of our days and focus of our energies, or rather, mine, since my mother was busy planning and packing for a solo camping trip in Colorado and Brendan had a nasty stomach bug of some kind and didn’t want anything too rich or spicy. I took on the challenge of cooking for all our dietary needs, temporary and otherwise; my mother became a vegan a number of months ago for health reasons. Her shelves and fridge are, luckily, stocked with enough staples for months of animal-free eating, neat rows of corked glass jars, bags, and cans of grains, seeds, nuts, beans, lentils, spices, dried fruit, and herbs. However, in honor of our visit, and in frank hopes of cadging some contraband, she’d laid in cod filets, salmon, organic chicken thighs, and New Zealand ground beef, in addition to all the kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, peppers, potatoes, onions, fennel, cucumbers, etc. bursting from the fridge drawers.
The first night, I made two mild curries, one of vegetables in coconut milk, and one of cod chunks poached in a curried bath of garlic, orange juice, cilantro and ginger, with red quinoa and a peach chutney made with apple cider vinegar. The next night, I baked the chicken thighs in peanut oil and salt and served them with Brussels sprouts in a glossy mustard-olive oil-honey sauce with toasted nuts, and sweet potato wedges roasted in a balsamic glaze.
On our last night, Brendan (fully recovered) and I made an Irish shepherd’s pie with the ground beef that had been flown around the world, which technically made it a cottage pie. The Worcestershire sauce-red wine-tomato paste gravy was gluten-free, and the mashed potatoes were dairy-free, but it might have been served, credibly, in a pub in County Kerry.
One evening, we went over to my mother’s friend Michael’s house for a glass of wine and to watch the moon rise over the wild desert. He’s wiry, blue-eyed, and white-haired and lives in the middle of nowhere. He built his own house over a decade or so and is currently hard at work on the stonemasonry of the outer walls. He lives with four parrots, the largest of whom is a lush who dips his beak into the nearest wine glass.
Michael has a clawfoot bathtub out in the desert beyond the patio where he takes hot baths in the snow at night in winter. His walls are hung with his large charcoal drawings of Montana rivers. Before he retired, he told us, he used to do graphics and advertising for liposuction-machine companies and is planning to write a book about it based on Waugh’s “The Loved One.” On the mantelpiece of the big stone fireplace he built is a squishy breast implant that looks like an objet d’art until you know its real identity.
Later that night, back at my mother’s, after a simple dinner of hot boiled red potatoes with olive oil, salt, and parsley, plus baked salmon and a mango-avocado-black bean salsa, plus more red wine, we saw a black-and-white banded kingsnake slithering along the flagstones of the patio. We went out to look at it, barefoot.
“Always wear shoes outside,” my mother said. “Everything out there’s out to get you.”
Then we prowled around my mother’s acre of hilly desert land with a special flashlight, hunting scorpions, which leapt into weird, neon-white relief in the purple light, curling tails and claws flagellating gently until my mother smashed them with a flat rock.
Mexican Salmon
In a blender, put 2 T each olive oil and frozen orange juice concentrate, the juice from 2-3 limes, 1 teaspoon of sweet paprika, 1/2 bunch of chopped cilantro, 3 cloves garlic, and 1/2 roasted red pepper. Blend into a creamy sauce. Pour over a 1 – 1½ pound piece of salmon in a baking dish and bake for 20 minutes at 375 degrees.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 31, 2012
Being cooked for is a great and startling pleasure for those of us who are used to being the ones who cook for others.
For my 50th birthday last week, Brendan and I drove up to Montreal with Dingo for 3 nights of walking, eating, and trying to speak French. On our way north, we stopped in Woodstock, Vermont. My older half-sister Caddie had cooked me a birthday lunch with her husband, Vin, and their 22-year-old daughter, Thea. They had made a rich pureed carrot soup with yogurt and toasted pine nuts, a delectable salad with oil-packed Italian tuna and niçoise olives, and a gluten-free ice cream cake. Thea helped me blow out the candles, and then I opened my present and cards. They had never met Brendan before; this was their first chance to check him out.
The five of us sat around the table on their screened treehouse-like porch and feasted and talked while Dingo lay at my feet. We stayed an hour longer than we were supposed to, and didn’t want to say goodbye. As I hugged Caddie, she gestured to Brendan and whispered, “Great guy!”
Months before, back when we were comparatively flush, Brendan had rented a bright apartment with a terrace on Avenue Laval, on the Plateau, that took dogs. Dingo had a loopy grin on his face the whole time we were there. He climbed the Mont-Royal twice off-leash on wooded paths, cadged cucumber, shrimp, red pepper, smoked salmon, and artichoke hearts during our picnics in the grass, and sniffed, if we let him, every single thing on the streets with an almost narcotic pleasure. When we went out for dinner every night, he subsided without complaint into his bed and greeted us with sleepy mildness instead of his usual sharply accusing barks when we got home, hours later.
On my birthday, Brendan took me to Marché 27, where we sat for more than four hours, maybe even five, eating dark briny seductive little Malpeques oysters, a brilliant salmon tartare with chipotle and mango, fresh beautiful salads, and a lot of Sancerre… the meal cost a fortune, but he’d set money aside months ago for my birthday. I toasted his thoughtfulness several times during the meal.
“What,” he said each time, “I’m not going to spoil you on your birthday? Of course I am!”
On our way home to Maine, we stopped in New Hampshire for dinner with Brendan’s mother, Kathy: lobsters, ears of corn, green beans, and tomato cucumber salad. We sat at a table outside in the clear, bugless evening and feasted yet again. The soft-shell lobsters were tender and so buttery they needed no butter. The corn was so sweet and fresh, it needed no butter either. Still, we availed ourselves of the melted butter, because it was there. Then I opened the present she’d bought me, a casserole tureen with a lid, made by a local potter: exactly the thing I needed. After dinner we lingered, still talking, until it was time to pull ourselves away and drive the hour and 15 minutes home.
When we landed at the Phoenix airport the other evening, Brendan stayed behind at the gates to change planes and fly on to LA for the night. My mother was waiting for me at the arrivals area just outside the passenger exit.
“This airport,” she said, after we’d exchanged our hugs and happy greetings and were waiting for the elevator to the parking garage, “is the worst. The signs are terrible! I asked two different people for directions, a janitor and a cop, and they both ignored me. They pretended they didn’t hear me! I actually said ‘Fuck you’ to the cop.”
“You did?” I laughed. “That is exactly the kind of thing I would do.”
My mother, who turned 76 and had carotid-artery surgery only a month ago, looked shockingly beautiful and strong and youthful. I couldn’t stop looking at her, telling her with joy and relief how good she looked. Brendan and I had booked our tickets to Arizona right after her surgery, when she was being kept in the ICU with dangerously low blood pressure. We were very worried about her then, but she’d commanded us to come later on, when she was recovered and could enjoy us. Well, she had certainly recovered.
We came out of the air-conditioned chill into the hot, dry air I remember so well from my childhood. We got into her Prius. I was very hungry. She had told me she’d bring something “light and cool” for the two-hour drive down to Oracle, so I hadn’t eaten much on the plane. She handed me a shallow, flat-bottomed straw basket full of covered dishes.
“Wait,” she said, “I have to put it all together.”
In one container was a cold cucumber soup, which she had made and frozen and let thaw on the drive up to Phoenix so it was perfectly chilled. She added a fresh salad of cut-up cherry tomatoes and stirred.
In the other container were dips to go with spicy blue corn chips: an olive and dried tomato tapenade, a pistachio, pea, and parsley dip, a white bean and sun-dried tomato paté, and a roasted red pepper spread.
I fell on this elegant, savory portable supper with joy. The soup was cold and thick, sweet with the tomatoes, and the dips were dense and rich with the crunchy spicy chips. The dinner was delicious and satisfying in itself, but it was made even more so by the fact that she’d made it just for me, had packed it so beautifully, and planned for it to be just the right temperature when I ate it.
We drove through the flat, hot, scattered-neon night with the air conditioning on, and I ate the cold food and we talked and talked. We somehow wound up going through Casa Grande and Coolidge, an unintentional scenic detour that landed us on a dirt road at one point, but we didn’t lose heart: we stopped and asked for directions, my mother hopping out of the car at a Circle K, a gas station, and yet another gas station. No one she talked to was a native English speaker: there was a sleepy Pakistani woman in the bullet-proof gas station booth, a scary-looking Mexican dude in the convenience store, and a second Mexican guy at the next gas station. No one had any idea where the town of Florence was, or the highway we needed to be on. No one had a map. No one was able to be the least bit informative, and their English was halting, but, unlike the cop and the janitor at the airport, they were all friendly, cheerful, and eager to give whatever advice they could, even if it was only to tell us to ask at the next gas station.
Finally, after burbling chattily through the night, we made it to Oracle, to my mother’s sprawling, cool, airy house on a rise with views of mountains all around. We sat at her table drinking red wine with ice for a few hours, talking and laughing until we dropped with sleepiness, and then the next morning we got up and kept talking until it was time to pick Brendan up at the Tucson airport. This time, we did not get lost.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 28, 2012
The worst dark nights of the soul, I think, are when my smaller failings rise up one by one in a chorus of metallic voices: that unwritten obligatory important letter, my tipsy, laughing, unintentional, klutzy faux pas booming into a sudden silence, the failure to speak when speaking would have helped someone…
These things are much worse to recall than any of my gigantic, life-changing mistakes. Those are boulders too big to see all at once, hulking, unmoving, and strangely safe, whereas the little things generate a cascade that turns into an avalanche. They’re all attached to one another somehow, neurochemically or magnetically, so that remembering just one of them sets off a chain reaction sparking all the way back through the decades with increasing centrifugal urgency until I’ve looped through my entire life, all the way back to the first one, which now seems worse than ever in light of all the others.
Deep breathing has never worked for me even remotely, but refocusing sometimes pulls me to safety if I can trick my brain into latching onto a different, equally powerful whirligig and transferring its grip. Evidently, my mind wants to whirl in those dark little hours when there’s nothing to distract it from its own petty storms. It wants to obsess and stew, rehash and foment.
But sometimes, if I start to picture what’s downstairs in the kitchen cupboards and fridge and those bowls on the counter, and try to piece everything together in a series of interesting meals, and fill in any gaps with a mental grocery list, it turns into a fun, riveting game so engaging I forget what a horrible person I am and fixate instead on the far more relevant question of what I plan to cook and eat in the near future. Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s some goat cheese downstairs, plus a butternut squash, some red onions, ginger, garlic. Also, there are some apples… a box of chicken broth… pine nuts…
Before I know it, I’m asleep again.
Those waking night voices of sharp remorse are the exact opposite of the escapist pleasures of the waking daydream, except for one thing: none of it is real, neither the urgent horrors of remembered transgressions nor the inventions of the untethered mind. Also, both are vastly improved with thoughts of food.
I used to talk to myself a lot as a kid and teenager. I used my imagination’s power to lift me out of whatever circumstances I found myself in, to whisk my brain away from anxieties and dissatisfactions. When I was 12, in 7th grade, I had a paper route. As I rode along on my blue 3-speed Schwinn through suburban streets, flinging the Phoenix Gazette onto lawns and patios and carport driveways, I told myself stories, aloud-under-my-breath, so engrossed in my narration, I never noticed anyone staring at me or looking at me at all.
I was especially fond of English characters, since I fancied I had an excellent British accent. I loved to say things like, “I don’t hold with that, Lady Winthrop, you know that perfectly well! I’ve always disapproved of such goings-on,” or, “My goodness, child, you’re all drenched from the moors! You’ll catch your death! I’ll draw you a hot bath straightaway, that’ll take care of those chilblains.” These stories always had food in them, which I conjured with loving, envious happiness: kidneys and rashers of bacon and buttered toast in chafing dishes at the breakfast-table for Lady Winthrop; strong tea and currant scones with jam by the bedroom fire after that hot bath.
On those days when I wasn’t in the mood for drawing rooms and moors, I narrated the ongoing saga of a group of high school students in Hobson Heights, a made-up 1950s Midwestern neighborhood, their romances and heartbreaks, the strivings and ambitions of the more interesting among them. On weekend nights, they piled into someone’s jalopy and went to the Burger Shack Drive-In to order icy Cokes in waxy cups with straws, salty, crisp French fries, and cheeseburgers with extra pickles and ketchup from girls on roller skates. After school, they loved to make cocoa, grilled cheese sandwiches, and chocolate-chip cookies before doing their homework at the dinette.
Eventually, I grew up and stopped talking to myself on a regular basis. I confined myself to the occasional gasp or soft screech during public waking hours whenever I realized something awful I’d done; I kept everything else to myself.
When I moved to Portland, Maine last year, it began to dawn on me that this town is filled with people, grownups, who walk along the sidewalks, yakking away. They’re not wearing earpieces. No one is with them. They don’t make eye contact with anyone. But their conversations seem fierce, opinionated, and punctuated. They cackle, roll their eyes, gesture, nod, and tsk-tsk at themselves.
So I’ve started doing it again, too. Everyone does, so why not me? Shortly after I got here, initially startled by the preponderance of what used to be called “crazies,” I started jokingly calling the place Freaktown. I still call it that, but there’s nothing but fondness in the term for me now, as well as self-implication. People in this town feel free to pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies, while the rest of the world walks along in silence.
Dark Night of the Soul Soup
Peel, core, and chop a butternut squash and three apples. Peel and cut up a red onion. Coarsely chop a knob of ginger and peel 8 cloves of garlic. Roast everything in peanut oil on a cookie sheet for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Puree with enough chicken broth to make a thick soup, adding half and half as desired. Salt and pepper to taste. Heat in a saucepan. Serve in large shallow soup bowls with goat cheese and toasted pine nuts on top.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 15, 2012
Back in my late 30s, when I lived in New York, I used to go fairly often with my then-husband to a French bistro called Casimir on the edge of the East Village, at 6th and B. Their waitstaff was sleek and snotty, and the food was mostly-hit and sometimes-miss, but the atmosphere was magical: old wood and candlelight and mirrors, great French accordion-and-violin jazz coming from invisible speakers, and, in those days, a tourist-free clientele – everyone in the room seemed to be whippet thin with aggressively understated hair, shining darkly with ennui, disdain, and savoir-faire.
In those days, the late 1990s, New York felt like a different place to me from how it feels now – before the Towers fell, before Times Square and Soho and my former neighborhood, Williamsburg, turned into urban Disneyworlds for tourists, before the police took over the streets, before NYU colonized most of lower Manhattan, the city felt provincial and worldly, sharp and dreamlike, gritty and dazzling, wild and enclosed, an island nation everyone was free to join at his or her own risk.
Of course, I was a lot younger then; things have a way of changing, perspective-wise, with age. Maybe younger New Yorkers find all those things, still, in the city. But as time went on, I found it all ebbing away, heartbreakingly, until I had to leave.
Back in the old golden days at Casimir, we generally scored a table only after waiting with glasses of wine by the bathrooms for what felt like an hour while waiters huffed to and fro, all of them seemingly empty-handed and trailing cigarette smoke. We always started by sharing a “Parisian salad,” which seemed to be the invention of someone in their kitchen, having nothing to do with either Paris or any traditional French dish, that I know of, anyway. But it was the perfect thing to have before their rich, perfectly flavored steak tartare, the other thing I always ordered, which came with a small bucket of perfect fries and a side of house-made mayonnaise. Parisian salad was light and savory and fun and elegant and beautiful – both plentiful and not too filling, the hallmark of a great starter.
Yesterday morning, way up here in bucolic, quiet old New England, I woke up craving those savory lentils and little mounds of beautifully dressed grated root vegetables; I also craved accordion-and-violin jazz blowing on wafts of candlelight over old dark wood reflected in enormous mirrors, but that, unlike the salad, was a little more difficult to come by.
Over my cup of coffee, I looked for Casimir’s menu online, just to doublecheck the elements, but I found that it is not on the menu anymore – yet another part of the New York I loved that seems to have gone forever. I searched for “Parisian salad” to see if it did, in fact, exist anywhere in recipe form; apparently, it does not, at least not the version I know — Elizabeth David offered a recipe for a Parisian salad made with cold sliced beef that looked amazing but which wasn’t, alas, the one I was jonesing for.
So I decided to recreate it from memory, but with a modification: instead of sliced tomatoes and a halved hard-boiled egg, I’d substitute leeks vinaigrette with chopped egg, my other favorite French salad. And I decided to add feta to the lentils just because I love the combination. Somewhere in bygone-menu item heaven, a scornful Casimir chef was no doubt frowning on me with displeasure, but I did not care: up here, I felt perfectly safe from his or her wholly imaginary wrath. It served them right for taking it off the menu.
And so, when Brendan went out yesterday afternoon, I gave him a list: du Puy lentils, baby arugula, feta, celeriac, carrots, beets, leeks, eggs, a red onion. He came back with all of it, and a slender green bottle of vinho verde we put in the freezer to fast-chill and then opened and drank while I cooked.
Tiny, green du Puy lentils are known as “the caviar of lentils.” They’re evidently grown in volcanic soil in the Auvergne without fertilizer, and they cost about $5 a pound, but they’re worth it. They taste richly of minerals and, because they have less starch than other lentils, they don’t get mushy when you cook them, so they are phenomenal in salads.
While a cup of rinsed lentils simmered away in salted water for 17 minutes, I steamed 3 cleaned, trimmed, chopped leeks and hard-boiled 2 eggs. Then I whisked together a strong-tasting, satiny vinaigrette, about 2/3 cup in all, of olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, a glob of Hain mayonnaise, and plenty of black pepper.
After the al dente, toothsome lentils had been rinsed under cold running water and well drained and put into a glass bowl, and the still-bright green but softened leeks had been plunged into an icewater bath, squeezed dry, and put into another glass bowl, I peeled and grated a large carrot, 2 medium-sized beets, and half a baseball-sized celeriac root and minced a medium red onion.
I divided the minced onion between the leeks and the lentils and added a big handful of baby arugula to the lentils. I peeled the eggs and crumbled them over the leeks, then I crumbed a big handful of fresh, mild feta into the lentils. I dressed both the leeks and the lentils with enough dressing to coat.
And then I arranged everything on two plates: a mound of each of the root vegetables, red and white and orange, then a mound of green leeks, and then a heaping mound of lentil salad. I drizzled dressing over the root vegetables on the plates.
And dinner was ready. It was just as good as Casimir’s, and maybe even better because of the leeks and feta, which added their slippery lusciousness and tart crumbliness, respectively, to the whole. My taste-memory was sated. I didn’t miss the steak tartare, but that is high on my list of other favorite restaurant dishes I want to make.
