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Saturday, November 24
AFTER ACTION REPORT
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 Nov 2007 12:42 AM PST
My
friend Jae and I supplemented our modest cooking skills with large
doses of improvisation and luck to concoct a truly splendid
Thanksgiving meal.
Jae, in an impulse of reckless ambition, decided he would make mashed
potatoes. "I'm going French with them," he said, but would not
explain what he meant by this.
In the end he made stupendously
good mashed potatoes and only after they'd been tasted would he reveal
his ingredients. Half-and-half for creaminess, a large but not
overpowering amount of finely chopped garlic, one single, large
shallot, a small amount of freshly grated Romano cheese and a pinch of
cayenne pepper. I can't say
what's French about any of this but I can say that the results were
delicious.
Jae made stuffing but added to it at my request some oysters and, on
his own initiative, as likely to complement the taste of the oysters
well, some crumbled fried bacon. Again . . . delicious.
Our large turkey for some reason did not produce much in the way of fat
drippings, so that late in the cooking of it we despaired of having
enough liquid in the pan to make gravy. On another inspired
impulse, Jae poured some pumpkin ale into the pan, which made for a
very fine gravy in the end -- an improvisation that could well become a
Thanksgiving tradition.
I confess I couldn't savor the meal as slowly and carefully as I might
have, because I started drinking too early in the day, and too many
different things. A rosé wine, then some of the pumpkin ale,
which had a cheerful, festive taste to it, then some Chimay ale and finally a
Merlot with the dinner. I was past consciousness even before I
got to the pumpkin pie, which served as a fine breakfast the next day.
Friday was a bit of a blur, sharply focused only by a turkey sandwich and by a viewing of Vertigo, which still yields up treasures after countless viewings in the past.
And so the time of leftovers begins. From the look of things this should last quite a while.
Thursday, November 1
LOUP GRILLE AU FENOUIL
by
Lloydville
on Thu 01 Nov 2007 02:21 AM PDT
Loup
grillé au fenouil, translated precisely from the French, means wolf
grilled with fennel. Those familiar with Mediterranean cooking will
recognize, however, that the wolf, the loup, referred to here is loup
de mer, the wolf of the sea, or sea bass. Sea bass grilled with fennel
is one of the glories of southern French cuisine.
I
first encountered it in one of the restaurants facing onto the harbor
of Villefranche, a small town just east of Nice -- a restaurant called
Mère Germaine. There are several restaurants just like it facing the
harbor, and loup grillé au fenouil is not prepared better in Mère
Germaine than in any of the others, but Mère Germaine is where I first
had it, and so that must remain the center of my nostalgia for the
dish.
It has
certainly never tasted better anywhere else -- except perhaps on a
terrace barbecue in Seattle once. A friend living there had discovered
wild fennel growing near him in a vacant lot, and used its seeds to
season the fish, its stalks to fuel the fire beneath, resulting in a
wholly satisfying sensory experience.
Nostalgia
is a potent spur to culinary ambition. One day while peeking into
the tiny seafood selection at my local supermarket I noticed a
tempting fillet of Chilean sea bass. I bought it, along with some dried
fennel seeds from the spice racks, and decided to see how close I could
come to recapturing the taste of those long ago nights on the Côte
d'Azur.
I
coated a small pan with olive oil, salted and peppered the bottom of
the pan, then covered it with fennel seeds. I placed the fillet of sea
bass in the pan and made two slits in the fillet. I coated the top of
the fillet with olive oil, salted and peppered it, and covered it with
fennel seeds, filling up the slits with extra seeds.
I set it under the broiler in my oven until the fennel seeds
were brown and thoroughly roasted, at which point the fish was cooked through but still moist.
I ate
it with a respectable Chardonnay from the Coppola vineyards, and the
wine was fine, but a drier one would have suited the taste of the fish
better. The taste of the fish was miraculous -- light but flavorful --
and the toasted fennel seeds gave a pleasant reminder of the dish as
it's prepared on the shores of the Mediterranean.
It was not by any means loup grillé au fenouil as you'd encounter it there, cooked on a real charcoal fire, seasoned with
fresh fennel. But it was poignantly close.
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