Tuna Mousse: Food for a Heatwave

It wobbles, it jiggles, it's straight out of the beginning of the middle of the last century. It's wonderful. It's tuna mousse. Wrong, somehow. But wonderful. And inhalable. I revive the recipe every year when heat threatens and I won't cook indoors. We are in for a possibly unprecedented week.

We  - the Frenchman and I - used to eat it on our rooftop in Cobble Hill, accompanied by Don Estorbo (de la Bodega Dominicana - a bodega cat before bodega cats were cool), with a wide view over New York Harbor. In those days we had a single, room airconditioner, whose roaring was no match for the baking heat. The rooftop was our evening escape.

Tuna...is overfished. Try and find pole-caught tuna: American Tuna, Wild Planet, or Whole Foods 365 brand are better choices. Walk past the Starkist. You are better than Starkist.

Tuna Mousse

The beauty of this decadent, 60's-suggestive mousse is that it goes with all the crunchy, healthy things: celery stalks, crisp cucumber spears, carrot sticks, endive leaves, snap peas (halved lengthwise), long breakfast radishes or round, stout ones, quartered.

Tuna Mixture:

2 cans tuna in olive oil, drained
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon ketchup
4 cornichons (tiny cucumber pickles) 
1 Tablespoon capers
2 Tablespoons lemon or lime juice
Freshly ground black pepper

Wobble Mixture:

1/3 cup just-boiled water
1 packet (1 Tablespoon) gelatin

For the tuna mixture: Combine the ingredients and whizz in a food processor till smooth. No food processor? Chop the capers and cornichons finely, then mash everything with a fork in a mixing bowl bowl.

Wobble mixture: In a small bowl, combine the gelatin and the extremely hot water and stir until the gelatin has dissolved. 

Add the gelatin mixture to the tuna mixture and whizz/mash again.

Taste. Assess the salt, pepper and lemon juice situation. Adjust.

Transfer the tuna mousse mixture into a small bowl or mold. Chill for at least 2 hours. To unmold, slide a knife dipped in hot water around its edges, cover with the serving plate, and shake until it plops out.

It wobbles. See?

Of course, you can also eat it with a good baguette, or dark brown Scandi bread. Or crackers. Or a spoon. Or on your own, with no one else watching.

Here's a bonus picture of Storbie, aka Estorbo loco, aka The Don. 

Gone, never forgotten. Eeep.

A tea to soothe sleep

 

Standing on the terrace recently I snuffed the air and smelled an unmistakable and welcome scent. Lindens were in city-wide bloom. Some still are.

Feeling besieged by the sense that the world is about to break over our heads?

Sip some linden tea.

Are the trees still in bloom, yet to bloom, soon to bloom, near you?

In New York, lindens are planted very, very widely. Littleleaf, bigleaf, European species, native North American species. 

Their flowers dry easily, and rehydrate gracefully. Linden tea has been used for a long, long time, to calm nerves, and soothe the sleepless. I am a convert.

Find the recipe and some gathering tips in my linden tea story for Gardenista.

Supper edition

Cool, grey, misty mid-June days and evenings have sent us back indoors for supper. 

Tonight's was a salmon oven-roast that we've fallen in love with and repeated many times. I first started cooking it in Maine, where we had access to superb - if farmed - Gulf of Maine salmon, and it has translated well to Brooklyn (with salmon farmed in the Faroe Islands; eating fish is...tricky, to say the least). 

The recipe is based on this one: spicy slow-roasted salmon, from The New York Times. I riff a lot with the spices, and often use berbere (the fragrant East African spice blend). And tonight's version included three tender, sliceable heads of spring garlic.

I was lucky to sip an exceptional 2020 dry Riesling this evening, from our friends at Storm Cellar, in Colorado. I treated myself to a six-bottle box of their wines, which arrived at our door last week. 

We had company. Pirelli enjoys salmon nights. He was a little impatient for the meal to begin.

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Green

It is all very green, where lately it had been brown. Lately is months ago. Lately was March and April, the tentative days of spring. But time compresses. Now, the terrace, the parks, the streets of the city, are very green. 

Raindrops sparkle on jewelweed's leaves. The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) blooms in late summer, and in fall. It is there for the ruby-throated hummingbirds. It is there for us, to lure the hummingbirds, for us to see.

The jewelweed is self-sown, from seeds detonated last year by spring-loaded capsules. Just two plants share a pot - come their height, they will be extremely thirsty, and the pot might be replenished twice a day. Jewelweed likes damp places. At night, it folds its leaves. 

On the terrace its companion, in another pot, is Thalictrum pubescens, tall meadow rue, a perennial whose shallow roots also relish water. Its parent grows in the Catskills, its feet in deep moss watered by a stream that trickles perennially down a clean mountain.

The raccoons are afoot again in the evenings, on the roof above the Boston ivy.

We wonder where they come from, and where they go.

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Refuge

The little garden is very green, a small echo of the park and wild spaces nearby. There has been a lot of rain. In the pots perennials are growing taller daily, working towards summer bloom that will last until frost.

 The green suits me. It's restful and varied, and the older I get the longer I can look at leaves. They're very quiet. The world is not.

Morse

Meet Morse Jones. They're a groundhog (he/she, we don't know). Morse, for obvious reasons, and Jones, because since the pandemic's worst days, when Green-Wood's side gates first opened permanently to the community, we have been calling a family of groundhogs that emanates from a burrow nearby The Joneses. 

Morse is very pleased with the grass situation, currently. Nice and tender.

Morse has been sending SOS's into the ether, but we're not sure any help is coming.

Peonies, two ways

On Monday I bought pink peonies in tight bud. $15 for three stems. Around the corner they are $20, and fully blown. Walking an extra 10 minutes gives me more days of flowers and money to spare. I photographed them today, Wednesday, in the evening. They have opened and smell exactly like roses.

I moved their vase to the stone table for our supper. After supper, they stay out on the terrace in the cool evening and cooler night, so they last a little longer. It's warmer indoors, and we're probably still a few weeks away - I hope - from succumbing to central air. 

Early in the month, when we had a brief heat wave, we closed all the windows and turned on that chilled air, and felt coccooned and shut off. It's better now, with open windows and doors, a through-draft, air clogged with pollen, and the singing of robins and mockingbirds, the warning of the kestrel, and the black headed gulls cracking hilarious jokes as they fly high above us, their voices beneath the jets and the choppers and the trucks and modified cars that ride like gunshots down the street.

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