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Dec. 19th, 2014 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksUgh, I don't mean not to have been writing here, but my brain keeps on either not coming up with anything to say, or else coming up with things which are long thinky essays that I would like to write but simply do not have the mental space for at this point in time. I will I am sure get to some of them eventually, but in the meantime, well.
I did have an experience regarding one of the usual dinners I make the other day, which caused me to remember that it's not a dinner I've seen many other households do, and so I thought I'd mention it.
For many years of living with Thrud, one of our default dinners was best describable as antipasto, and it's a really good dinner for a day one has been shopping. You get a loaf of bread, baguette or pain batarde or something of that sort, from the grocery store bakery department, and you get the best tomato you can possibly find in the store, organic if you can swing it; also fresh basil; also the kind of mozzarella that is high-quality enough to come in salt water, but not the ludicrously expensive kind. And you can get a jar of green olives, or of black olives, or of green olives stuffed with garlic, depending on what people like, and a jar of marinated artichokes, and maybe a jar of sun-dried tomato spread, or you can take these jars out of the fridge if you do this frequently enough to have them there. Then you wash the tomato and basil and put everything on plates with serving implements, and everyone takes what they like, in the combinations that they want it, and ninety-five percent of the work was in the shopping, and it is a delicious dinner, good enough for company and reasonably healthy. You can even make other people cut their own tomato and basil. This is of course also especially useful if you need to cause dinner for an unpredictable number of people two minutes after walking in the door, which is a thing that happens around Thrud.
So I was grocery shopping recently at the time of day where when you get home the last thing you want is to make dinner, you just want it to magically appear from the heavens, preferably within thirty seconds after you sit down, and consequently I was shopping for antipasto. But it is the dead of winter, and they did not have any fresh basil. Which is fair. All right, I thought, we just won't have fresh basil this time. Then they didn't have any reasonable mozzarella, i.e. anything other than shredded, which while all very well in its own way is not really mozzarella and does not work for this. And I despaired a little, because I did not want to think of another dinner on no notice at all standing in the grocery store.
Then it occurred to me that most major European cuisines have appetizer-y courses or light meals centered around bread, and there is no reason it has to be, specifically, antipasto. So I bought a jar of hearts of palm, and some of that Portuguese farmer's cheese that is exactly halfway between mozzarella and ricotta in taste and behavior, and some sliced linguica, and a hummus mixed with tapenade, and it was just as good. I could have gotten a jar of white asparagus, and a curdier farmer's cheese, and quince paste, in a vaguely Spanish direction; or a Brie and the fancy European butter and some bitter chocolate and some anchovy paste, in a French one; or even, I suppose, black bread and mustard and sauerkraut and some pickled mushrooms, if I'd been the only person in my house eating it, and called it vaguely German.
This may or may not mean that we have this dinner more often. But it is certainly a useful revelation given the vagaries of season and grocery store.
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comments over there.
I did have an experience regarding one of the usual dinners I make the other day, which caused me to remember that it's not a dinner I've seen many other households do, and so I thought I'd mention it.
For many years of living with Thrud, one of our default dinners was best describable as antipasto, and it's a really good dinner for a day one has been shopping. You get a loaf of bread, baguette or pain batarde or something of that sort, from the grocery store bakery department, and you get the best tomato you can possibly find in the store, organic if you can swing it; also fresh basil; also the kind of mozzarella that is high-quality enough to come in salt water, but not the ludicrously expensive kind. And you can get a jar of green olives, or of black olives, or of green olives stuffed with garlic, depending on what people like, and a jar of marinated artichokes, and maybe a jar of sun-dried tomato spread, or you can take these jars out of the fridge if you do this frequently enough to have them there. Then you wash the tomato and basil and put everything on plates with serving implements, and everyone takes what they like, in the combinations that they want it, and ninety-five percent of the work was in the shopping, and it is a delicious dinner, good enough for company and reasonably healthy. You can even make other people cut their own tomato and basil. This is of course also especially useful if you need to cause dinner for an unpredictable number of people two minutes after walking in the door, which is a thing that happens around Thrud.
So I was grocery shopping recently at the time of day where when you get home the last thing you want is to make dinner, you just want it to magically appear from the heavens, preferably within thirty seconds after you sit down, and consequently I was shopping for antipasto. But it is the dead of winter, and they did not have any fresh basil. Which is fair. All right, I thought, we just won't have fresh basil this time. Then they didn't have any reasonable mozzarella, i.e. anything other than shredded, which while all very well in its own way is not really mozzarella and does not work for this. And I despaired a little, because I did not want to think of another dinner on no notice at all standing in the grocery store.
Then it occurred to me that most major European cuisines have appetizer-y courses or light meals centered around bread, and there is no reason it has to be, specifically, antipasto. So I bought a jar of hearts of palm, and some of that Portuguese farmer's cheese that is exactly halfway between mozzarella and ricotta in taste and behavior, and some sliced linguica, and a hummus mixed with tapenade, and it was just as good. I could have gotten a jar of white asparagus, and a curdier farmer's cheese, and quince paste, in a vaguely Spanish direction; or a Brie and the fancy European butter and some bitter chocolate and some anchovy paste, in a French one; or even, I suppose, black bread and mustard and sauerkraut and some pickled mushrooms, if I'd been the only person in my house eating it, and called it vaguely German.
This may or may not mean that we have this dinner more often. But it is certainly a useful revelation given the vagaries of season and grocery store.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
