This Month
| June 2007 |
| Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1
|
2
|
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
|
Thursday, June 28
ELVIS FOOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 28 Jun 2007 06:59 AM PDT
Admit
it -- sometimes you just get a taste for Elvis food, for the stuff he
really loved, like banana cream pie. Tucking into an oversized
slice of banana cream pie you can almost feel what it must have been
like to be a bloated, drug-addled cultural icon and genius on the road
to destruction, and sense Elvis's own childlike bewilderment at it
all.
Incidentally, if you live near a Marie Callendar's, as I do, try their
banana cream pie, which tastes old-fashioned somehow, like a pie you'd
get served at a 50s-era lunch counter or school cafeteria. I just
know Elvis would have approved.
Monday, June 25
BLUE TROUT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 25 Jun 2007 02:57 AM PDT
Sometimes after a long day of writing my mind is gripped by strange ideas about food -- strange in the sense that they
don't involve Swiss cheese and crackers or peanut butter sandwiches or frozen meatloaf dinners.
One
day, as it happened, I was reading a piece by Mr. Ernest Hemingway
about trout fishing in Europe. In it he described a method of cooking
trout he had encountered in Switzerland at rural inns. It involved
boiling the trout until it turned blue in a liquor made of water, white
wine vinegar, bay leaves and red pepper -- not too much of any
ingredient in the water, says Mr. Hemingway, without further
elaboration.
This is not the blue trout described by M. F. K. Fisher, which involves placing the trout live into boiling water, unless
the Swiss innkeepers were holding out on Mr. Hemingway, but it sounded fine.
I
remembered that my local supermarket sometimes offers fresh
rainbow trout, so I headed over there late at night and found one
handsome specimen in the fish department. I brought it home, filled up
a large pot with water -- it was a large trout -- emptied about six
ounces of white wine vinegar into the water, added six fragrant bay
leaves and a light sprinkling of cayenne pepper, and set it all to
boil. When it was bubbling I slipped the fish in.
I turned the heat down and simmered the trout for about fifteen minutes. In
fully boiling water, ten or less would have been more than sufficient. I
tested the fish using a method recommended by an old edition of The
Joy Of Cooking -- which is to separate the meat from the bone of the
spine at the thickest middle section of the fish. When the meat there
is tender but no longer translucent, the fish is done.
I ate
the fish with drawn butter, as Mr. Hemingway says the Swiss did. "They
drink the clear Sion wine when they eat it," adds Mr. Hemingway, but they
don't depend on the beverage department of a
supermarket for their wine. I made do with a perfectly respectable
Pinot Grigio by Bolla, cheap, dry and light. I keep looking for
the clear Sion wine, though -- Sion, pictured below, is the primary
wine-producing region of Switzerland:
Even without the Swiss wine, the
result was a meal of almost unimaginable delicacy. Trout is delicate
anyway, and the light seasonings in the water only emphasized the
subtlety of its taste. It all resonated on the tongue like a memory of
food -- insubstantial and fleeting.
|
|
