A Finger in Every Pie

Figs

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

                 - Epictetus
 


I have eaten fresh figs in the past -- but somehow I had never really eaten a fresh fig.  Or maybe that sentence should read "...somehow I had never eaten a really fresh fig."  Until yesterday. 

It was a completely serendipitous moment:  a visit to the Connecticut home of old family friends, now quite elderly.  Their daughter, my friend Wendy, had flown in from Chicago, and called to ask if I would come up to visit while she was in town to celebrate her mother's birthday (and it was indeed a birthday of some note).  We have many strands of connection.  Wendy's mother had been my own mother's closest, most sister-like girlhood friend.  I was the flower girl at Wendy's wedding.  And these are the friends who generously offered their beautiful home as the venue for one of our own wedding parties last May, gorgeously situated at the top of a hill overlooking the Long Island Sound.

When we're all together, I am always pierced with that sense of missing my mother in the company of others who also miss her, deeply and daily.  It's the sort of bittersweet feeling you would rather have than not have.

Before I left, I was told that I must go out and gather some figs to take home.  Never one to turn down an opportunity like that, I asked Wendy to come outside with me as her parents went off for their afternoon rest.  "Won't they miss these figs?" I asked.  "No," said Wendy.  "They have so many, they don't know what to do with them."  Oh, to have a fruit tree.  The figs were ripe and perfect, and I popped a little one in my mouth as we picked forty or so of them. 

I was surprised.  They didn't have the insipid sugary flavor that I've come to associate with figs, even fine, farmers' market specimens.  These were complex and floral, with a lovely tang countering the sweetness, a bit like fresh ripe berries but with their own fibrous figgy texture. 

On the train ride home, I ate more of them.  And despite the fact that recently I've been baking up a storm, and that our kitchen contained no less than three different homemade goodies -- pumpkin apple streusel bread, scented madeleines, chocolate-coconut-almond bars -- more figs were what I wanted for dessert last night.   

I don't know why they're so different from any other figs I've eaten.  Is it simply that they were ripened on the tree, and picked so recently?  If so, then these are the only sort of figs that I ever really want to eat.

I might have been a momentary purist, and said that I only wanted figs for dessert last night.  But if the truth be known, the figs are also very very good with those scented madeleines. 

National Meatloaf Day: There is a Balm in Gilead

K walked into our apartment and burst into tears.  J followed, and allowed G to pour him several fingers of Dalwhinnie scotch, neat.  The couple we'd invited over for meatloaf night -- or actually, an early celebration of  National Meatloaf Appreciation Day -- arrived at our home in the midst of a raging fight. 

Never one to do things by halves, I'd been cooking all day.  You'd think it's a simple thing, having friends over for meatloaf night.  You just have to whip up a meatloaf, toss together some veg, and there you are.  But little by little, a more elaborate version of meatloaf night overtook me.  We'd need starters -- can't let people have drinks without something to start.  There'd have to be something for dessert, if only because I wanted it.  And I wanted mashed potatoes, too, which would then require gravy.  G would want collard greens, since they're still in season and well, he always wants collard greens.   Suddenly I was preparing a very full-blown meal -- slow-roasted tomatoes on country bread, some cheeses and crackers and nibbles, the main event and sides, and a rustic fruit tart with ice-cream to finish. 

Then came the really crucial question: what sort of meatloaf to make?  My attempts at recreating my mother's meatloaf never quite make the cut for me, and I don't know why, as I watched her make it countless times.  I have others that I make, though.  There's been a healthy turkey loaf with red peppers, or the Italianate polpettone I've made with tomatoes and herbs and the zip of grated pecorino romano and parmigiano reggiano cheeses.  I've even tried a nice meatloaf of Nigella Lawson's with a light glaze of homemade applesauce, which worked surprisingly well.  I knew G's vote before we even discussed it.   It's been quite a while since I made his favorite Tex-Mex Chile-Cheese Meatloaf, which I lifted from the Julie/Julia project, and which requires your cardiologist to be on call during dinner, especially if G gets his way and I put a slice of bacon on it as well as cheese.  But for the present occasion, I had something else in mind -- something classically meatloaf, yet elegant, a bit out-of-the-ordinary, with a haunting, savory gravy.  A meal that would look like a blueplate special, but have four-star flavors to leave you craving more.   And which would, of course, make stellar sandwiches the following day. 

I started with three kinds of ground meat, and ended up with a loaf that even as it evoked its kissing cousin, paté, was still and all a meatloaf.  I savored the chef's prerogative of a little mini-burger of the meat mixture, which I cooked up to test the seasoning. I loved the smoky, woodsy, meaty flavors.  I would even say it had umami.  This meant I could leave it in the fridge to await oven time, and then turn my attention to all the other things I'd somehow gotten myself into.  By the time our friends arrived, I'd sifted, mixed, chilled, rolled, peeled, chopped, baked, roasted, parboiled, whipped, and was ready to rock 'n' roll, with appetizers already out on the table.

"Everything's dreadful," K wept as she sat down on our sofa.  The men stayed in the kitchen, and I wondered if we were doomed to an evening of boys on one side, girls on the other, along the lines of a junior-high mixer.  Then K caught sight of the platter of slow-roasted tomato tartines (thanks Luisa!) and some nice cheeses on slate boards.  "Everything's dreadful," she repeated, "but this makes it a lot better," and she began laughing through her tears.  We imbibed various stress-reducing, pleasure-enhancing substances, and things calmed down.  I brought the men some hors d'oeuvres, since they were somehow still too shy to come in the living room. 

As we moved on to the main course, however, the guys were forced to join us; I needed the kitchen table to set out my diner-esque buffet.  Everyone served themselves generously and returned to the living room.  Slowly, over bites of creamy mashed potato pooled with gravy, the adversarial couple began to exchange shy glances.  By the time they'd eaten their way through many slices of deeply flavored meatloaf and extra forkfuls of greens, they were floating a few well-selected but terse words to each other. 

Then, like a quartet of beached whales, we reclined to watch five back-to-back episodes of Weeds.  At that point we served up vanilla-bean ice-cream alongside the tart, which was composed of apples, plums and the last of the season's raspberries.  Despite its truly rustic appearance, it was actually so fruity, so flaky, so melting that it deserves a separate post of its very own (you see, I finally managed to make the pastry of my dreams -- but more about that another time).  By this time the sparring couple was once again on speaking terms, if not yet billing and cooing.  While it had not exactly been the festive and uproarious evening I'd had in mind, all had turned out well. 

I credit the reconciliation to the food, of course.  What other sort of meal could exude such comfort?  Friendship is a balm indeed -- but then again, so is meatloaf. 

Meatloaf for Difficult Moments

1 oz dried porcini, soaked in 1 cup warm water for 1⁄2 hour
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 large shallots, chopped fine
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 Tbsp. bacon drippings or olive oil
1 cup soft fresh bread crumbs (I used the inside of a rosemary country loaf)
2 eggs
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp. fresh thyme leaves
2 tsp. chopped fresh rosemary
1/2 tsp. Bell's Seasoning
1 tsp. truffle salt (or sea salt, if unavailable)
2 tsp. black truffle paste
1 tsp. anchovy paste
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
freshly ground black pepper  -- about 1 tsp.

1 1/2 lbs. organic/natural ground beef
1 lb. ground veal
1 lb. ground pork

Drain mushrooms, reserving liquid for gravy. Sauté onions and shallots in bacon drippings or olive oil in a large skillet until soft, about 5 mins. Add garlic and sauté for a minute or two. Place the sauté in the workbowl of a food processor, and add the reconstituted porcini. Add bread, eggs, Worcestershire, rosemary, thyme, and all seasonings -- everything, in fact, except the meat. Process until everything is blended.  Place three ground meats in a very large bowl, and add the mixture from the food processor.  Blend everything together with your hands.  Shape into a large, oblong loaf and place in a  rimmed baking dish.  At this point, you can refrigerate it until you're ready to cook it. 

Preheat oven to 350F. Put meatloaf in, and cook for about an hour.  Test with a meat thermometer, and keep cooking until it reads 150F.   Let the loaf rest for 20 minutes before serving.

In the meantime, trick out a gravy from the porcini liquid.  I used a spoonful of packaged demi-glace (you could use any beef stock or concentrate), a bit of soy sauce, some more truffle paste, cognac and some cloves of roasted garlic I had left from another dish.  This was all cooked together, pureed with a hand blender, very slightly thickened with a flour slurry, and enriched with a few spoonfuls of  cream.  Once the meatloaf is more or less cooked, you can use a bulb baster to suction up the meat juices from the cooking pan, and add them to the gravy.  Serve over fluffy mashed potatoes and meatloaf slices.  To achieve a true diner look, use the back of a spoon or small ladle to nestle a crater in the top of each mound-like serving of mashed potatoes, and fill with enough gravy to overflow the crater and trickle down the sides.

Succotash Slow-Down

If you don't know the glory of fresh shelling beans, it's high time you learned.  Now is their moment; you really don't have any time to waste.  Shell beans are at their height in your farmers' market, as is the last of the corn, which will initiate you into the mysteries of succotash  -- and I'm not talking about the nasty  packets of frozen stuff you were forced to eat as a child. 

At the moment, my favorite shelling bean is the lima bean.  It's no wonder that some varieties are referred to as "butter beans," especially in the South.  They are so tender, so starchy-yet-creamy, so perfect.  Yes, yes, I know all about your childhood trauma and how much you hated them, there on the plate next to the overcooked liver and how you had to sneak all of it to the dog in order to get your Kit-Kat bar. Yeah, me too.  It's time for us to get over it.  We have  now evolved to the point where we like the lima beans better than the Kit-Kat bar, especially when they're fresh.  Even if it may cost a manicure or two to get them out of their pods. 

While fresh peas probably still reign supreme in my legume affections, I prefer fresh lima beans to cranberry beans, although I love the little red-splotched guys too.  But it's the texture of the  butter beans that wins me over.  With these beauties, it's important not to err on the side of undercooking -- you don't want even one bean that is gritty or crumbly rather than meltingly tender.

Vegetables like fresh lima beans provide the perfect opportunity to slow down.  Instead of using pre-washed salad greens and pre-peeled garlic and frozen vegetables and all those other conveniences on which we rely at times in the name of getting a meal on the table, today you can decide that you will slowly, meditatively take the time needed to choose the best, firmest green pods.  Then you start shelling, working your way through a couple of pounds of the twistilinear hulls, noticing that your yield of beans is, sadly, quite a bit smaller than the growing pile of spent pods next to you.  You have to figure out the best way to open them -- can you slit one side with a fingernail, and pop out the beans?  Sometimes these bean-husks are too resistant for that, and you have to break off an end, and see if you can peel a thread of membrane along one side to get the pod open.  And other times you just have to fight and wrestle with it until you can get those babies out of there, slightly bruised or nicked but none the less delicious for that.

Although they're more work than my beloved English peas or the prettily painted cranberry beans, they're actually far less effort than favas, with just as great a reward, at least in my opinion. And once you're done with the pesky shelling, some very succulent dishes are but a few minutes away.  My current favorite, as you've no doubt guessed, is succotash.

The Northeastern Woodland Indians created this particular vegetable mixture, which serves as just one tiny example of how much has been lost by the suppression and destruction of tribal knowledge.  Beans and corn together (and sometimes squash, for a perfect "three sisters" vegetable dish) balance each others' nutrients. The beans and squash both provide niacin, as does the process of treating the corn with lime, also known as "nixtamalization," another Native American invention.  If corn is a major part of one's diet, and is not nixtamalized nor eaten with niacin-rich foods, dire circumstances may result.  The early inhabitants of this continent knew how to balance the grain.  Not so southern Europeans, and most particularly the Italians, who when first introduced to corn (and hence, polenta) in the 18th century, became so fond of it that they ate it to the exclusion of many other foods, and developed pellagra -- as did many inhabitants of the southern United States during the 1900s.

Succotash is worth the effort not only for the superiority of its balanced nutrition.  I truly think it one of the most delicious things you can eat in the early fall.  If you wish, leeks or green onions are good additions, as are the last few summer squash or green beans.  I prefer it in its simplest form -- corn, beans, a little butter, a soupçon of good cream, salt, pepper, and a generous lashing of piment d'espelette, or failing that, ground cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes.  This could also be easily adapted to any dietary restrictions -- the cream isn't strictly necessary, although it creates a lovely bit of sauce, and the butter can be replaced with a splash of olive oil, if you don't use dairy products.  However you modify it, take a moment to slow down, and give fresh succotash a try before the frost sets in. 

Simple Succotash
serves four to six moderately, or else just two people who can't believe how good this is. 

3 cups of shelled lima beans (from about 2 1/2 lbs. of beans weighed in the shell)
4 ears of fresh sweet corn, kernels cut and scraped from the cobs
2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. cream
a grating of nutmeg
salt, pepper, piment d'espelette, cayenne or red pepper flakes
pinch of sugar (optional)

Cook the limas in about an inch of boiling water, until creamy and tender.  This could take anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes, and you can only really tell if they're done by tasting them, since cooking time will vary due to the size and age of your beans.  Drain them and reserve. 

Melt the butter in a medium sauté pan or skillet, and let it brown just slightly, until it foams and has a nutty smell.  Gently add the corn kernels and sauté for about five minutes or until the corn seems done (again, this will be dependent on the size and maturity of the corn kernels).  Add the beans, the cream and all the seasonings, and simmer together for a couple of minutes until the cream is thickened, and all the ingredients have melded a bit.  Taste, and only add the dash of sugar if the natural sweetness in the corn and beans needs a tiny bit of heightening.

Serve alongside almost anything.