I See Food Dying

Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets. When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish where every passing serial sneezer can feel free to cough, drool, and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperatures, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.

—Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour

Peasant Palate: Salad Days

It’s hot, dry, and still here. Daytime temperatures monotonously in the 90s, or above. Swamp-cooler relief only. I would like to cook, but simply looking at the stove makes me weep. The other day I wanted some beef jerky, but, remembering that cooking it requires racking the beef six hours in the oven at 200 degrees, I realized that trying it now would be a form of suicide. Every day, these days, I feel like this guy.

So, it’s salad time. Vegetably things that do not (usually) require the application of heat. Follow the “furthur” for seven salad recipes; hopefully, dishes you’ve not already grown weary of. Know, for instance, that the French have a penchant for decreeing a dish a “salad” even if it’s really a mountain of cheese or a mass of writhing squid tentacles. Be prepared for some of these.

Peasant Palate: Lamb For Possum

Seems possum, a.k.a. Jerry Northington, once and future candidate for Delaware’s lone seat in the US House of Representatives, likes to gnaw on little lambs.

Not all Americans are so inclined. My daughter, for instance, still pretty young, eschews little lambs for “Mary-had-a” reasons. My mother, not quite so young, avoids the creature because, while growing up during the Great Depression, she was too often invited to the family table to dine on tough—though plenty cheap—mutton. Sixty years on, she remains averse to encountering even the odor of the ruminant, as it bubbles in the pot, much less the thing itself, placed on a plate before her. Understood.

But in this “Peasant Palate” we pay no attention to such people. Instead, with possum, we bare our fangs, and prepare to receive between them little sheeps. Know that the mutton that so nauseated my mother is not on the menu: “lamb,” which is what is today sold in American supermarkets and butcher shops, and is referenced in all seven recipes below, comes from the beastie cut down before it enters its second year. It is sheep slaughtered past that date that become “mutton.”

As the first two recipes are Italian, a little Italian food music to take us to the “furthur,” music presented in three languages: English, Italian, and scat.

Peasant Palate: Ennui A La Mode

I haven’t felt much like cooking for several months now. Fogged in ennui. It happens. Problem is, I’m the one who cooks in this house. So if I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

When recently I cleaned out the car after a week’s worth of dreary commuting and discovered several discarded Burger King bags, I realized Something must be Done. It may be true, as mi compenara once said, that Chicken Tenders are well nigh irresistible, even to a vegetarian, but you can’t live on them. Or shouldn’t, anyway. Not unless you’re acting out a death wish. Apparently I had been eating these things on a fairly regular basis without really thinking about it. Wrong.

So slowly I’ve been reacquainting myself with the stove. Preparing meals that, unlike industrial fast-food fare, are not cheerily intent on killing me. But also meals that don’t require a lot of time or energy. Cooking For The Weak, as it were.

On the jump I share seven recipes for those similarly enervated. Or for those who just like good food.