Monday May 21, 2012

NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m going to ramble a bit today. Maria (wife), Francesca (daughter) and my sister in law are all off for the week in Mexico at a spa having quality female bonding time (and celebrating Francesca’s graduation last week). This means that Basil (the Norwich Terrier) and I are home alone. Do we have miserable litle lonely guy meals, gnawing on pizza crusts and drinking a designer beer? Do we impose ourselves on our friends, offering entertaining conversation in exchange for protein and alcohol? Not on your life.

When I’m on my own I cook. It’s a chance to experiment. A chance to order out for a pizza without shame if I cook up a disaster. Since last Friday (when the women in my life left) I’ve done 7 variants on a hamburger, sous viding them to medium rare and finishing at high temperature. Various blends. When to salt. And so on. Today I looked around for ideas and found that I had a copy of the “Blackberry Farm Cookbook”. I’m a lucky guy – we have a lot of friends in publishing who send me cookbooks. When this one arrived I thought “Ugh – not another farm to table picture book.” I had forgotten that Blackberry Farm is currently the premier foodie destination in the country. Anyway I cooked a braised rabbit, and roasted hen of the woods mushrooms and corn pudding. A college classmate, Ted Elliott, has settled north of San Francisco and has made a career at wine – I opened a bottle of his TR Elliott Queste Pinot Noir (2008). The wine was better than the food. The rabbit was delicious but had a slightly dry mouthfeel (isn’t rabbit always like this?). The corn pudding was fabulous but the liquid proportions and cooking time were wrong for my stone ground corn meal – if I hand’t made adjustment it would have been corn chowder. As I said . .

A neighbor in Connecticut gave me a bunch of rhubarb – a golden opportunity to make rhubarb sorbet. Anyway, here’s dinner, taken with my relatively new Puji X-Pro 1 and a 50mm Fuji lens.

And the sorbet:

On this day last year: Green.