Something’s Happened

There must be a term for it—for the sense of total euphoria that is also accompanied by sheer and utter disbelief and shock. I blink and it is still there. I sleep a full eight hours (bravo me!), and when I wake up it is still lingering around, clinging to the bed sheets, draping itself wildly around the curtains, puncturing even, the early morning light. I can’t shake it.

It’s what most young, burgeoning bloggers must feel when they discover that their tiny, secret, under-the-cover-of-a-great-big-internet-rock blog has just been posted to the Bon Appétit website. Bon Appétit, people! The single most amazing food magazine in the nation. I am still shaking my head in disbelief. I am also, and this one may be even harder to comprehend on an emotional level (so oblique the feeling can be, so occasionally far off): HAPPY. It takes a lot to get me there sometimes, but here we are.

You can find the momentous occasion itself here. We (that is, you, dear readers, and me) are image eight in the slideshow. We are beaming, can’t you tell?

It’s been almost impossible ever since to try to come up with what to make next. Oh my god, the soundtrack in my head plays, what will I ever make again? I’ve wrestled through a few ideas. I’ve called my mom about them—rattling off a list of spiraling, food-related thoughts (she is very supportive). I sit down with stacks of books and magazines and pour over them late into the night. In my dreams I bake galettes that are rubbery and stiff, or I make compotes that are gelatinous and murky. I’ve been in a bind. One that, I can only imagine, has been brought on by the celebratory joy and revelatory anguish of being noticed.

But it’s more than that, too. It’s that—no matter how many cookbooks I look through, or magazines I flip through, or food blogs I read—ultimately, the appetite always wins: one’s choice of what to make or eat can’t come from a carefully designed program of which meals will be popular, or what everyone else will feel like consuming in any particular moment, or how this specific dish will photograph, or how this entry will look next to that one. The choice of what to eat is dictated by some other thing—longing and nostalgia, weather and mood, memory and dreams colliding with seasonality, what’s available at the grocery store, which shops you will pass on your way home, who you may have spoken to on that particular day.

The appetite is elusive and intangible—what drives it is some mysterious combination of unseen factors, constantly changing and circling around that ultimate goal: to feed one’s hunger.

We do this in many ways, I think. Food is one of the least detrimental and perhaps also the one with the most potential for unfettered, uncomplicated joy. 

So I went through that list of prospective galettes and tarts and pies and cookies and shortbreads and brioche rolls and jams and chocolates, and then, when it was 76 degrees in San Francisco (a heat wave!), I made watermelon instead. Watermelon that was dusted with chiles and salt. Watermelon that you could slurp up in enthusiasm; whose juices would drip down your chin; whose spicy bite and sweet, cold crispness would glide, in ever-so-refreshing a manner, down your throat. Watermelon that would make the inside of your cheeks cold, and the tips of your fingers pink and soaked, and the picnic blanket a stained mess, and all of those other good summery things that make us feel, if only momentarily, like we are young again.

I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind.

In the end, this is not a recipe: it’s a sort of incitement for pleasure. It’s something that will take you no time at all. It’s something that you’ll be able to do just by briefly looking at these photographs, by just barely skimming these words. But let’s eat it and be happy.

We have a lot to celebrate.

Watermelon with chili salt (adapted from Bon Appétit)

Watermelon slices

4 teaspoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons chili powder

2-3 limes

Slice a chilled watermelon. In a small bowl or salt dish, mix together the salt and chili powder, adjusting to taste. Arrange the slices on a platter, sprinkle with the chili salt, and then generous squeeze a lime directly over top. Consume immediately, when cold and spicy and dripping with lime.

David Tanis, in Heart of the Artichoke, suggests dipping a lime in a chili powder mixture and squeezing this over a platter of jicama, avocado, and orange. I tried the chili/lime technique both ways—by sprinkling the chili salt and then squeezing the lime juice over top, and also by dipping a halved lime in the mixture and then squeezing out the juice. I think I prefer the first method—but this, really, is a matter of taste. Just employ the ritual that will optimize your satisfaction—all the better if you are basking in the sun while you do it.

To Begin and to End

What you do in between is really up to you. I offer you today only the beginning and the ending of something. But a delicious beginning and ending it shall be, I promise. I’ve recovered from all recent whirlwinds, found myself on stable ground again, bought a guitar (a relief—living without one was like a cruel form of torture or sensory deprivation), and I am beginning to cook again. (Did anyone else feel like the recent astrological activity made everything and everyone crazy?) I’m also beginning to realize that spring is quickly slipping through my fingers and that it is time, high time, to seize hold of its finest before the deluge of summer squashes and corn and tomatoes begin vying for attention. It’s already starting—last night at the Headlands Center for the Arts I ate my first cherry of the season, and my first plum, all swirled and rosy in a bit of cardamom-scented honey-yogurt. But we’ll save that for another time.

What I have for you today concerns asparagus. And it concerns a way of eating asparagus that was previously unknown to me. Most likely you are all fluent in this method. Probably you’ve been doing this since you could walk. But to me, it’s been a revelation. That method is raw, that is: DO NOT COOK THE ASPARAGUS. It seems wrong at first—you think back to all of the asperges au vinaigre you have consumed, or the grilled spears with parmesan that you buy pre-made at your local specialty food shop, or the steamed kind that you slide a poached egg over, and you feel in some sort of a deep, intrinsic way, that this just simply can not be. But of course it is. David Tanis said so—and when, I ask you, is he ever wrong?

The recipe is not even a recipe: I didn’t measure a single thing while I prepared it. But that’s honestly my favorite way to cook. Baking, of course, is another story all together, and as we learned here and here, I tend to be soothed, in those moments, by the careful and precise need for measurements and weights, ounces and teaspoons, leveling off and carefully folding, and all of those other little details that come together to make the baked thing what it is—in all of its delicate complexity, coming down, essentially, to the touch and the hand of the baker. Cooking is similarly defined by touch—by individual nuance—but in a way that tends to be more forgiving I think. And you can often adjust as you go.  

The difficult thing about this recipe is a practical, skill-based one. It has to do with the shaving of the asparagus. Tanis recommends using a sharp knife or vegetable peeler, or a mandoline. My guess, after sweating through the process and mildly cursing the dull blade of my vegetable peeler, is that the mandoline would be your best bet. But I don’t like to be dissuaded by a lack of fancy tools and neither should you. The vegetable peeler works, it’s just harder than you think it will be, and it took me a little practice to get the method down. I worked toward my body rather than away from it, which seemed to be easier, and I also tried to apply a firm and even pressure. The great thing here is that if you mess up, it really doesn’t matter, you just need to have achieved, in the end, some relatively thin strips of the vegetable, to be tossed in that magical combination of lemon and olive oil and salt.

What you will have as you progress through this “recipe” is a layering of thinly shaved asparagus; a few leaves of arugula—just enough to catch and fill all of the spaces between the thin, long spears; a generous squeeze of a lemon; and a drizzle of slippery olive oil—all bedecked with salt and pepper and thin shavings of parmigiano reggiano. This salad is an ideal springtime beginning for a meal of any size or scope. It could even, truth be told, make a meal all on its own. The asparagus, when raw, is crisp and fresh and tastes like the purest essence of asparagus that you’ve never tried. It also stands up sturdily to the acid of the lemon, making this salad something that could be prepared (with the exception of the arugula leaves) a day or so in advance.

It is truly my new favorite thing; and above all, my new favorite way to do asparagus.

Now, I take you to the end of the meal. Fast forward through time a bit—you’ve started with that delicious salad, you’ve received rave reviews all throughout: raw asparagus—they will cry—what a revelation! You’ve served some bit of fish with dill and capers, or a pistachio-crusted bird of some variety, or some nice, tender, well-marbleized piece of beef. Your guests are happy and full and sighing and letting the warm, springtime sun graze their bare shoulders. The glasses are being emptied. The beginnings of an evening light are starting to descend. You—calm and collected, effortless and relaxed—take out a bowl of gleaming, juicy strawberries, and set it next to a dish of just-whipped cream; cream that has been, in all manner of ethereal beauty, infused with chamomile blossoms.