Caesar Salad

Saturated acid colour. Sorry. Evening apartment light and lettuce = yellow.

Caesar salad is not really salad. It is food. Salad is light and good for self righteousness and comes with something else righteous in a different way, like...steak? Or as a precursor to a Serious Meal. Don't get me wrong: I worship at the altar of salad.

I knew someone in Florida whose idea of salad was buying pre-made Caesar salad from the supermarket, complete with sachet of white goop called dressing. I stayed for a week and when I got home to Brooklyn ate arugula for days. And thanked God that I wasn't born in or sentenced to Orlando.

The first real Caesar I ate was under the plane tree in my mother's garden, during a legendary lunch, and for some reason making it seemed a performance. I made it to the letter, and we found it strong and surprising. My mother creates the best and most beautiful, and the most deceptively simple salads I have ever eaten. I judge restaurants by salads. The dressing, the leaves. Texture. The salad is like a cross section of a kitchen under a microscope. It tells you everything. You see respect in a salad. Or not. If not, you may as well leave.

So. What I like to do with a Caesar is to boil an egg softly and scoop out its still runny yolk. What you do with the white is up to you. The yolk I beat with 1 Tbsp sherry vinegar, 1 anchovy fillet, a crushed garlic clove, some sugar, pepper, rarely salt, and olive oil. I put this into a bowl, toss in my chunked Romaine or other sturdy lettuce, and toss with my hands - grate some parmesan over the top and then toss again. Lots of fingers to lick.

I bastardize it by cooking some thinly sliced pancetta and frying some chunks of peasant-type sourdough bread in the fat. Add. Eat.

To keep track of inconsistency (or evolution, or mood), click here to see one I made last year.

The leaf blowers of the LICH

It's Saturday. Morning. For hours every second Saturday the Cobble Hill neighbourhood around the LICH is plagued by the hospital-sponsored, high-pitched whine of leaf blowers blowing dust and debris from point A to point B. Constant high pitched roar. Gas-powered, noise polluting, air polluting, irritants.

This is landscaping at its best. Not gardening. Landscaping. Think woodchips, bad topsoil, plastic lawn edging and '70's borders of orange impatiens at the feet of ill-(motor)-trimmed yew hedging.

Did I mention it's SATURDAY???

East Houston median in the rain

Five weeks later:

I took these this afternoon leaving the Lower East Side for Brooklyn, and home.

Above: Geranium 'Rozanne' somewhat swamped by rain-heavy Nepeta 'Walker's Low.'

The first echinacea! I'll confess, it is not a favourite flower of mine - though some new varieties are spectacular. They are long-blooming though, and tough, so that factored into my choice for this traffic-blown strip of land in New York. I have to check my records to see what variety this is: I have forgotten...

The poor Gaura 'Whirling Butterflies' were puny when they were planted, and I was worried. Now look at them. I had wanted to intersperse them with Calamintha nepeta 'Montrose White', to really knock the bees out - but the Calamintha were still dormant and not viable yet. I think it's just as well. The way things are growing we'll have too many plants.

A hedge of agastache, dwarfing the roses. That wasn't planned.

Looking back west down East Houston. It's a happy median...

I'm thinking September for the current lot, future park across the road.

Three weeks after it was planted here.

Elderflower cordial: June Friday

Well, I invented it on a Thursday. Yesterday.

I was working at home to try and get a day free of distractions - to work on a design for a Tribeca rooftop. But a flurry of emails whirled up, from another project, and by the time evening rolled round, the idea of DRINK had been embedded. 'n Groot, donnerse dop. Beeg dreenk.

Invent is a disingenuous word. One never invents, when it comes to food and drink. Nothing new under the sun, blablabla. I'm sure this exists somewhere. Someone has mixed it, and enjoyed it, and forgotten, or never had the urge to give it a name. Or called it something else.

I was thinking gin. I have Bombay Sapphire at the moment. In the picture above you'll see a decanter of clear stuff. Oops, that was Cointreau. Used for Margaritas and Crepes Suzette, thus infrequently. But when you need it you need it. I caught the mistake before an atrocity was perpetrated and swapped the decanter out for the one below. The scent of crushed juniper. And I abandoned the idea of Cassis.

(Yes, I need a new butcher block. I'm on it.)

My terrace mint is looking good, so...mint. Lime because...no excuse: I find it hard to move without lime or lemon. Habit. The worst of reasons.

But the elderflower cordial was a must - it has an addictive flavour I find hard to describe. Sweet, an astringence, a brightness that I like to think is of the flowers, white in English hedgerows.

The elderflower cordial is sweet. So the lime is the justification. Sweet can only succeed in context.

The prototype on the plexiglass seat with the rose petals on a wet evening. It was delicious.

Today is Friday and it is still cool and raining in New York, which makes me happy. So I remixed the drink, confirmed that it works, and here it is:

June Friday

4 parts Gin

1 part Elderflower Cordial

Half a lime's juice

1 sprig mint

Icecubes, a cocktail shaker. I am not a fan of stirring. I like drinks to be shaken. Alcohol cannot be bruised. But I am open to persuasion. The art of which has been all but forgotten.

Not Easy

Discoveries

I had to crush a leaf a little to make sure: yes, a thyme seedling. From a minute thyme seed, fallen sometime last year, frozen through winter, nourished by rain, germinated and 2 inches high this June.

Sweet surprize. The sniff-test confirmed it as as summer savoury. Grown about 6 feet away last year in a tiny pot, allowed to go to seed, and look. I have summer savoury again. One of my favourite cooking herbs.

And another one, smaller, up amongst the fallen petals.

I also discovered that I can hoover up my rose petals without sucking up gravel. Sweet.

The first garden

My mom photographed this magazine -note to self: scanner for Christmas - to show someone who is helping cut back and re-arrange her garden, what the herb garden used to look like. It's the first garden I designed, when I was either 13 or 14, and fresh from a trip to England, where I saw a herb garden like this growing at a hotel in the New Forest.

This was the year we moved into this house in Constantia, evident from the fact that one can see all the way to the greenbelt beyond. The hedge at the bottom of the garden is now some 12 feet high in places, a glorious tangle of trees, shrubs, and climbers, home to many birds.

The herb garden is now very shaded and not too useful for many herbs, and so that is changing. It reminds me that one of my first loves was herbs and their lore, and remains so.