Lunch-figs

This is largely a repeat of Chris' blogpost today...but it's an example of how little things can make an experience approach or depart from, perfection. Of course we're being privileged, here. We are not in Darfur or quaking in Baghdad. Nor on the street outside waiting for our next fix. So...perspective, and the ridiculousness of life must be taken as a given.

Regardless, and donning the shell of apathy without which we'd be hanging from sheet in a mental institute:

We had lunch at Lucien. I like Lucien (the place, I mean. I'm less sure about the man, Lucien Bahaj, who treats his waitstaff with medieval contempt, with the exception of our waiter, FluffBomb, today, who was both inept and favoured, apparently. Hm, what's up with that??), despite seeing how...deliberate it all is. It's a small place, maybe 30 covers, and the owner is almost always there. Same as Al di La, in Brooklyn. He greets us as friends, gives us little gifts of wine, figs (today), kisses my hand when we leave and tells me I bring sunshine to the place. I simultaneously smile in pleasure and grit my teeth in, oh-this-is-so-obviously-a-ploy...

But it is nice. And it makes us go back. Though I argue the good food helps, too. Good, not extraordinary.

But his gift of figs today, at Monday lunch, really was sweet, and I adore figs. I also adore Chris' iPhone which took the picture. Sigh.

I Love Clustrmaps (again)

I admit that I was very rude recently and referred to Clustrmaps, in a comment on Christopher's blog, as Clustrf#**!'s...This after our maps consistently told us that NO ONE, NOWHERE had been reading our blogs for days. I wrote to them, and received a reply within hours. And today our counters are up and running again. It is sweet and nice to know that in the commercial ether of cyberworld real people do exist and fix things. It is a free service (at our level), after all.

From: Marie Viljoen
To: theteam@clustrmaps.com

Subject: Hate new Clustrmaps update for little blogs
Hi Team
I used to love my dots. No longer. So if the new experiment "as of late September" continues, I shall de-Clustr. I'm sure many smallbloggers like me feel the same. We all have big egos, after all.

Love
Marie

From: theteam@clustrmaps.com
To: Marie Viljoen

Hi... whoops, I'm wondering if we conveyed the wrong impression in our wording... what we meant is that "as of late September" we have actually LOWERED those thresholds so everyone is actually getting MORE FREQUENT updates! I would be extremely grateful if you could elaborate (just a sentence or two) on what you meant... in particular
a) did your dots 'miss a few days' (this is a possible for completely unrelated reasons... nothing to do with the 'late September' business...
b) did the wording in our little FAQ sound more 'ominous' than we intended? (if so, we can quickly edit this for clarification)
The notion of 'de-Clustr' is of course VERY bad for us: we were especially designed for 'smallbloggers' as you put it, and take enormous pride in listening to all of our users and trying our best to help in every way possible.
As you can see, you're getting a very personal reply directly from 'mission control' early on a Saturday morning, and we hope you'll help us to clarify the situation... we would hate smallbloggers to think that we have set things up the wrong way!!!
Many thanks!!! -CJ on behalf of the ClustrMaps Team

So I really don't know who CJ is and whether he/she is sitting in an airconned garage somewhere in Arizona or in a cubicle in Silicon Valley or at home on the plains of the Midwest or...? Not a clue.

But I feel a bond. And now I feel loved again.

It's pathetic, I know.

Green Bean Salad

Last night was one of those I'd-better-see-what's-in-the fridge nights.

I found:

French beans. Half a red onion. Kalamata olives. Organic bacon. A head of funnel. Bulb of fennel just sounds...wrong. Some radishes. And I had parsley on the terrace.



So I blanched the beans for a few minutes in salted boiling water. While that was happening I cooked the bacon till crisp and drained it on kitchen paper. Sliced the radishes in thin halfmoons (appearance is everything), thinly sliced the fennel, ditto the onion, took the parsley leaves off their stalks. Parsley, radishes and fennel went into a bowl. Broke the bacon, 6 rashers, into pieces and added. Tossed the hot beans on top, with the olives. Dribbled a capful of olive oil, sprinkled salt and pepper and a bit of brown sugar and shook over some red wine vinegar. Then tossed it with my hands to blend properly...

I served it to myself with some toasted baguette over which I had rubbed a garlic clove. I may
also have wiped the bacon pan with it first...

Yum.

Potted Fish

Back to basics...

Food, I mean.

I meant to post the fishy thing below some time ago, just before I went to South Africa, but events overtook me. I made it for Constanza one night, and for the life of me I don't remember what else we ate. The idea comes, sort of (most ideas are sort of) from Heston Blumenthal's pub The Hind's Head, in Bray, England. Which is, I think, a lot nicer (and a lot less expensive) than his famous restaurant next door, The Fat Duck. Which should be called Teutonic Waiters with Attitudes. Or, Stick a Pin in Us We still Won't be Spontaneous. Or, Smile at Us and We Will Spit in Your Soup (If You are Stupid Enough to Order Soup, Roll-of-Our-Eyes).

The pub is wonderful. He serves English food. Yes, it does exist. And no, it won't kill you. It will make you want to live. I have been lucky enough to be taken to both restaurants by good friends Robin and Eileen Short, on 6-8 hour layovers at Heathrow on my way to Cape Town from New York. I would say the pub is easily one of the nicest places to eat, anywhere.

So, my version. A stick of butter (where all good things begin, no?). Land O'Lakes being my personal favourite in this Bush-doomed land. Melt it.

One hunk o' fish. This is mah mahi. I hope no one tells me not to eat it...I chop 3 garlic cloves and half a bottle of anchovies and rub it all over the fish fillet with some lime - maybe a whole lime's juice. Then I cook it quite gently so as not to burn the garlic and make it bitter, till cooked through, but just. In this case you do not want rare fish. Ugh. Not good for potted...

Then you wait for it to be cool enough to handle, peel off the skin and shred it (no, the fish, not the skin!) with two forks. It doesn't have to be two forks, but it helps. Shred shred shred. Pack the shreddings into a little bowl, or two. Pour over the melted butter, which should cover all the fish and top with freshly snipped chives. You may need a bit more butter.

Chill. Serve with crisp toasts or crackers (or biscuits if you belong to the Commonwealth). And wine. It freezes well. Vince and Constanza (again), ate the second pot earlier this week and they are both still alive.

No Grouper-Groping

And on a completely different note, here's why we can't, nay, must not, eat Grouper. On the same subject, no Chilean Sea Bass aka Patagonian toothfish, either (you know who you are!). It REALLY annoys me that Dean and DeLuca, who should know better, continue to sell it.

In Jerry's interview, assuming you click on the link above, do the eyes behind the mask not look remarkably 007-like? OK - no throwing up. Just thought I'd mention it...

Remembering to Remember What's Important

My landlord raised my rent a few days ago. It was inevitable, of course, but still one hopes it won't happen. There have been floods, leaks, a sliding door that defies the name, and workmen in boots.

Feeling depressed, tonight I spent a few minutes on Craigslist re-aquainting myself with what it means to search for an apartment and quickly came to the conclusion that I should just suck it up. I am paying for my location, which is wonderful, and my terrace, which is, well, me. I can find an apartment for less, with more space, but it won't be two blocks from one of the nicest wine shops in New York, or from the iconic Sahadi's, where I stop by several times a week and am greeted by name, or Mr Lee's with all his beautiful fruit and vegetables, or the dry cleaners, where I can leave my raincoat for five months without them tossing it (thank you, Vince), or Constanza two blocks away, or the F train three blocks away; or the fish shop or the baker or Robin des Bois. And it won't have a terrace. That faces east, the rising moon and sun, the church steeples in green copper and sandstone; utter privacy, the wide blue sky, the reward of watering and claiming as prize, flowers, fruit, herbs...

It seems I have become entrenched. For the moment at any rate.

Now with HDR, maybe this picture would have had a chance. I knew the light was doing something funny as I was walking home. The sky was torn up, the wind was making mini tornados and blowing up dust and every now and then an acid clear light would strip the buildings and make them glow. Up on the terrace this rainbow appeared suddenly, over downtown Brooklyn.




Photographed in early September, above, and this evening, below, I now know that my David Austin rose, Abraham Derby, is able to rebloom twice in the month, from fullblown rose to fullblown rose. I cut it back just before I went to SA, and fed it heavily with the Blue Stuff that still makes me blush (but which WORKS)...and there's the proof. Results Count, as Pa says...

Bubbly, Birds, Balthazar and Breakfasts aka Slightly After Coffee

On the 21st of September, Vincent and I met in person for the first time, at Newark International Airport, where he flew from Vancouver BC to have a cup of coffee with me. He had written in an early email to me that if we lived closer he would ask me out for coffee or a glass of wine. I said he could ask me out for coffee, anyway. So he did. Then flew across the continent and passed through customs to buy it for me.

We talked about it as we walked home last night, five days and a lifetime after the coffee, on Henry Street from Al di La, where we had had dinner.

...and earlier, on the Lower East Side, at 'inoteca, where we were having a lunchtime glass of prosecco each. We were just reaching the end of those when the waiter reappeared as though telepathic, with the bottle. Instead of allowing us to order more he said, "A gentleman inside would like to buy you both another glass..."

???

We wanted to know who the "gentleman" was and what he wanted. The waiter disappeared again. At last, through the open window of the restaurant, a familiar, curly head popped out, Benigni-like, smiled widely and waved, "Ciao!"

Emiliano! Owner of Al di La, my favourite restaurant in the world, which I have not frequented much of late, but which has seen me through my whole New York evolution, since 1999, when I first discovered it in Park Slope. Somehow it and he and Anna's cooking have seen me through the wars, and I have felt that they must keep track of who I'm with and why (and why???, and huh?). Only that morning I'd been saying to Vince that I'd like to eat there with him. It's a lovely place, and he the loveliest man, and I wanted the two to meet.

So to have Emiliano, who was having his own lunch with his chef-wife Anna and son Sasha, see us and send us that bottle of prosecco, soon to be bubbles in our perpetually smiling mouths, was like a blessing from the pope. Only much-much better because I have never wanted to be blessed by any pope.

It topped for me, an almost endless series of coincidences and fortuities that have accompanied this madly out-of-time relationship beween me and Vince: as of today, if you count the very first contact between us, via a comment on his blog, we have known about each other for two months.

So after the obligatory cup of coffee to test the waters, and a whirlwind five-and-a-half-days, I have learned a few things:

Frenchmen fetch croissants for breakfast.
Canadians find fall in New York unbearably hot.
Vince is really tall.
Movies do come true.
Beer tastes good at the yacht basin with a strong breeze off the Hudson.
Not all waitresses are French.
When Vince points his camera at you he doesn't want to steal your soul.
You're allowed to dip your croissant into the coffee.
New Jersey deserves more respect.
There are jumping fish in the Gowanus Canal at night.
When cab drivers and park rangers see you are in love they don't get mad at you.
Never eat grouper.
Peeing in your wetsuit does not keep you warm.
Ask for what you want. Then stick around.

"Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

...this bird (nut hatch?) was in a hawthorne in the DUMBO Park. So small and pretty.

 

Grey Goose martinis at Balthazar.

 

Vincent plus Balthazar plus green olives plus martini.

 

A balanced lunch.

 

There may be no greater gift to one than the heart of the other's croissant.

Croissants inside.

Croissants outside on the terrace, and the art of the dip...

And finally, getting down to serious stuff:

 

Two cats talking. Mano a gato.

I believe that seals the deal.