About eating

From California last week, my friend Amy sent a postcard with a quote on it. The quote has everything to do with what I've been thinking about lately in relation to food. Also, Wendell Berry is pretty much completely right about everything, all the time. I love that guy.

"Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend." — Wendell Berry

Mustard-maple salmon with hollandaise sauce

Sauces are one of those "scary food things" that have long intimidated me.

When I saw a "cooking class" article in this month's Cooking Light about sauces, I felt newly inspired to get over my anxiety and try making a sauce from scratch.

Lalah and I decided to try preparing a simple piece of salmon and making a hollandaise sauce to accompany it.

Step 1 was going to Whole Foods and picking out a really beautiful piece of wild caught walleye salmon. Behold:



Step 2 was buying the ingredients for the hollandaise. Hollandaise is basically a warm, buttery version of mayonnaise. It's one of the French mother sauces. (Frankly, just the phrase "mother sauces" makes me want to attempt cooking all of them. Either that, or take a bath in them.) Hollandaise known for its rich, silky texture and its versatility.

Because the hollandaise was going to require a lot of attention, we selected an exceedingly simple recipe for the salmon, something that would require us only to place it in a glass pan and put it in the oven.

A couple of hours before dinner, I marinated the fish in dijon mustard, maple syrup, and balsamic vinegar (recipe below). That was the most complex part of the salmon preparation.

Over at Lalah's house, we rolled up our sleeves and got into the hollandiase. The timing of this meal was tricker than most meals we've prepared. Because we wanted to have the salmon coming out of the oven at the same time that the hollandaise was ready, and also at the same time that we had fresh asparagus and broccoli emerging from steam, we had to be on our toes. We adopted the phrase "gazelle-like intensity" to explain our mindset for preparing the sauce. We did a little fist-bump and then donned our aprons.

As it turns out, preparing hollandaise sauce does indeed require gazelle-like intensity. This is not the meal for a lazy cook, or for a Sunday afternoon when you just want something nourishing and simple. This is a great dinner to prepare with a two-person cooking team interested in exploring a somewhat technical meal. The preparations basically required full attention from both of us.

Having had no previous experience clarifying butter, Lalah and I worked together to make judgment calls about separating the solids from the butterfat. That was really helpful.

It was really useful to have one person focus on the sauce while someone else watched the vegetables and salmon and managed the plating. (Sorry, I just said "plating." Someone shoot me.)

Yes, we melted and whisked and clarified and blended and by the time we were done, we had something approximating hollandaise sauce. I even pulled out my grandmother's old gravy boat so we could serve it properly. It was the first time I've ever employed that particular piece of china.



Conclusion: the salmon was excellent, and made even more excellent with the addition of the sauce. The sauce itself was a little grainy and not quite as velvety as the sauce in the beautifully art-directed photo in the magazine. It would never have made it into service at a mid-level French restaurant. But it had terrific flavor, and was a delightful addition to the meal. Two thumbs up for a challenging and spirited cooking adventure.

Mustard-Maple Salmon
3 T Dijon mustard
3 T maple syrup
1 T balsamic vinegar
1/4 t salt
1/8 t freshly ground black pepper
4 (6-ounce) salmon fillets (about 1" thick)
Cooking spray

1. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large zip-top plastic bag; add salmon. Seal and marinate in refrigerator for 20 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 400º.
3. Remove fish from bag; discard marinade. Place fish in 11 x 7 baking dish coated with cooking spray. Bake at 400º for 12 minutes, or until fish flakes easily when tested with a fork.
— adapted from Cooking Light


Hollandaise Sauce
1/2 cup unsalted butter
2 large egg yolks
2 T cold water
1 T fresh lemon juice
1/8 t salt
Additional equipment: cheesecloth

Editorial note: I'm transcribing this recipe exactly as we prepared it, and exactly as it appeared in the magazine. Some other recipes for hollandaise call for straining the melted butter through cheesecloth at the end of step 1. I think this is probably the traditional way of clarifying butter. I wish we'd had cheesecloth; it definitely would've helped us separate the butterfat from the solids. Also, some other recipes involve vinegar and peppercorns. Although this recipe worked well enough, I can see myself trying a different hollandaise recipe later.

1. Place butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat; cook 5 minutes or until completely melted. Carefully skim solids off the top with a spoon; discard solids. Slowly pour remaining butter out of pan, leaving remaining solids in pan; discard solids.
2. Combine egg yolks and 2 T water in a small saucepan, stirring with a whisk until foamy. Place pan over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens slightly. Gradually add 1/4 c clarified butter, about 1 T at a time, stirring with a whisk until each addition is incorporated and mixture is thick. Reserve remaining clarified butter for another use.
3. Stir juice and salt into butter mixture, whisking until blended. Yield: About 2/3 c (serving size: about 1 tablespoon).
— from Cooking Light

the spiritual vibrations of food

I've been wondering for a while about what to do with this website.

I'm past my personal era of confessional blogging. I no longer feel inspired to bare my heart to all who visit this space. But I have enjoyed writing here a lot over the past five or six or seven years — I forget how long it's been — and I don't want to give it up.

This week I'm having an epiphany about how to use this space. Naturally, this epiphany comes with a story. (Epiphanies usually do.)

At the end of December, my good friend Lalah and I went to North Carolina for a women's retreat led by Christine Kane. We had a wonderful weekend, full of laughter and reflection and unusually delicious food. The meals at this weekend were prepared by a local chef, a lovely woman named Deva who served mostly vegetarian fare. Many of the vegetables she used for her dishes came from her own garden. Each meal was colorful, inviting, comforting, and delicious. Almost as an afterthought, I'll add that these dishes were probably pretty nutritious, too.

On the way home from the retreat, Lalah and I stopped to have lunch at the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville. We both had a post-retreat glow — we felt clear and aligned and happy. We had been fed beautiful food for three days. We had been drinking herbal tea and doing yoga. We were feeling pretty zen.

Lalah said, "I loved the food at that retreat. Everything felt totally nutritious and totally yummy at the same time."

"Yeah, it was really nice."

"I really want to learn how to cook," she said. "I've always wanted to feel more comfortable in the kitchen."

"Well, maybe you can take lessons," I said.

"Or maybe we could try cooking together," she said.

Hey. There's an idea.

Since January we've been getting together to cook. It usually happens about once a week, though we took a few weeks off in February when life got in the way. We talk beforehand about what to prepare, and we take turns buying the groceries. Dishes are often vegetarian, but when they're not, we steer toward sustainably harvested seafood or free-range poultry. We go for the good stuff.

The meals are timed carefully after the arrival of Lalah's husband home from work and their 3-year-old son's nightly bedtime routine. They are not elaborate meals, but they are consistently delicious. And the process of cooking with Lalah in this context has been, well, utterly delightful.

Here's what I really want to say in this entry:

As I've been cooking with Lalah, I've been tuning into the many layers of my relationship to food. I've become much more attuned to what I would call the spiritual vibrations of food. Does that phrase sound a little odd to you, or do you instinctively know what I mean? There's a difference between eating a plate of nachos with yellow cheese sauce, and eating a little piece of really good cheddar from the farmer's market with a sliced apple. There's a hell of a difference between eating a Smart Ones® Honey Mango Barbeque Chicken frozen entree (that's part of Weight Watcher's "Fruit Inspirations™" line, FYI), and actually preparing a piece of free-range chicken with a chutney barbeque dressing.

It's not just the nutritional differences between these options that I'm talking about — it's the way you feel as you're preparing the food, how you feel when you're eating it, and how you feel afterwards.

What I'm seeing is that my relationship to food feels like an invitation to something richer, something more sacred.

I think this is something a lot of Americans are waking up to right now. I don't think Michael Pollan's message would have had the same resonance if he'd been writing in the early '80s. But now, his words are like springs of water in the desert.

We're reaching the end of our relationship with un-reality. We're reaching the end of our relationship with fake food. Eating an Egg McMuffin doesn't really fly when we can dine on fresh berries and Greek yogurt instead.

In the coming weeks and months, I'll bring you reports from my cooking dates with Lalah. I'll give you our recipes and a summary of what we loved or didn't love about the recipe. I hope you'll read along, and comment, and even cook along with us.

I'm looking forward to this.