Charles Simic has a poem entitled
Weather of the Soul,
and to serve it up he writes:
if it eases a little, send for the boy... and let him bring [food] under your big umbrella. The butter beans and cherry tomatoes will be prepared gazpacho style, pureed pure in their stock and blended with cucumbers and cantaloupe. Avocado oil will be drizzled after chilling the soup in the fridge, and into the bowl will be a pink plumeria on a basil leaf boat for you to pick carefully and smell, as if delivered by the boy. This is what's imagined in the poem.
But the food is real. Real in the sense you have it for lunch, beachfront, with lightly toasted tranches de baguette, served up with a sweet sun tea Meyer lemon. Nutrition plays a part in what taste of goodness brings to your body. These beans are creamy and rich and the tomatoes are sparkly acid, salty and herbaceous, and to sop up a breadful of the soup with your hands to your mouth is an emotional need satisfied bodily but doesn't fill you out. I think Mark Bittman might have said something to that effect of luxurious eating without the guilt and waste. Reversely this dish can be served hot. Add the following to the beans and tomatoes: celery, pumpkin and curly parsley, mashing them all up a la minestrone thick soup. Your preference. But for full dining experience, don't forget about the boy.
The plant-based hazelnut milk was simmering in the pan, and the sage essence was flying. The dessert was simple enough to build: the cookie was still intact and moist; the chocolate bar a pure seventy-five percent dark and sea-salted; the natural sweetness of the dried coconut shreds to be released by the milk blend; the melting of the bar to stick the chiffonade of coconut together and the resulting tower can be plopped on the cookie and while still warm put the herb on top. Root spicy with tart and molten ganache flavor profile competing in texture of crumble and toast, rendering the cookie a "warm ice cream" infusion, and the richness of the coconut was broken at last in the crunch, and in the "chocolate sundae" that melts in your mouth. But there's a story to the sage. Once upon a time the ecology of the coastal sandy hill where this herb thrives was eons ago under sea level as evidenced by the lime seashells (and other sediments only belonging to the bottom of the ocean) lay there wasted on the dry mountain like "Ozymandias." The interconnections of two land systems emerged like this is a beautiful wonder. And the sage smells grand. Somewhere between a sea moon night and an oasis of palms. The book The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman is an archeological poetry reportage of what makes a chef's chef. The evidence of this culinary mastery is surprisingly indescribable in terms of skill and experience in the kitchen. The soul of the chef is lost in his greatest now, and in his legacy to come but stay with us.
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