(no subject)

[rushthatspeaks]

Ugh, 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.

Comments

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

I do this too! But I call it mezze, and get lavash bread, merguez, ready made tabouleh (not as good as homemade, but if I were going to make homemade, it would be a different sort of dinner), hummous, olives, and feta, preferably sold in brine, preferably Bulgarian because that's what my father-in-law has impressed upon me is correct for reasons that have never been explained to my satisfaction. Anyway, that's a reasonable dinner for us and doesn't even require cutting a tomato :)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that does sound good. I never think of that because ninety percent of ready-made tabouleh or kibbeh or dolmades has onion, so I can't, but I could get merguez for me and the other thing for Ruth...

[rosefox]

I wish I could figure out how to do something like this in our household. Our closest equivalent is having a cold roast chicken on hand at all times. Hard to do an antipasto-like thing without bread, cheese, or pork products. :/

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Hummus, lettuce leaves to wrap things in, raw and pickled vegetables, hard-boiled eggs? Sort of towards the Vietnamese soft roll end of the flavor spectrum, with, like, pickled daikon and hoisin sauce, or the Turkish end with pickled turnips and shredded mint? Best I can think of. :/

I used to do the roast chicken thing, but now I'm the only carnivore in the house and I can't go through one on my own fast enough. I miss it.

[rosefox]

Unfortunately most of the things you suggest are things X can't or won't eat. :( The roast chicken is a godsend, as are frozen homemade meatballs that can be nuked into dinner.

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

Can you do gluten-free bread? Would injera or dhokla or pappadum or something work for you?

[rosefox]

No, the issue is really that the list of things X can't or won't eat is much, much longer than the list of things they can and will eat.

[sovay]

a loaf of bread, baguette or pain batarde or something of that sort

I can't wait until I can actually bite into bread again. (Braces.) I have just started toasting cheese on challah and I still have to cut it up into bites in order to be able to chew it. I do not remember eating all of my meals between fifth grade and eleventh with knife and fork, so at some point this must get better, but right now I am just impatient and annoyed.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

::delurks:: I do this, in most of the ways already covered. vaguely grouped, but still often quite random selections, e.g. pickled anything, broiled mushrooms with anything or even just brushed with olive oil, some sort of spread, some sort of cheese, some sort of sliced fruit, or occasionally thin sliced red onion, some sort of sliced sausage, or tinned whole fish. ::relurks::

[papersky.livejournal.com]

We call this "reach out for the good things that are there". And there's usually some kind of fruit, too.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

This is a thing that used to happen in my extreme youth, but only in summer, when we could get the tomatoes and basil from the garden. At dinner, it was with Pepperidge Farm rye bread from the freezer, toasted. At breakfast, my father would walk to the bakery and get fresh bread before the rest of us woke up. And we'd always have it with olives and cheese and marinated artichokes. I never thought of doing it in other styles.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of thing I do when I am traveling and want to acquire a real dinner from a grocer rather than from a restaurant, though usually with a subset of ingredients so that I can possibly finish them all myself. It's not the kind of thing I typically think of doing at home, so thanks for the suggestion!

(Apparently my phone app managed to turn this into an independent post the first time I tried it, so hopefully it will work properly from a real computer...)