I got my first real day off in a LONG time today thanks to the patience and generosity of my business partner, and had a glorious big blowing blue autumn Saturday full of hanging out with Ceej, catching up on "Dexter", writing the most difficult part of a grueling piece of pornographic short fiction that's been frightening me of late, and some other ordinary things including doing the dishes and bathing the cat. After all this normal perfection (the cat didn't even object to her bath too badly) I knew I had to produce a meal that would make me and Ceej happy, in the making and also the eating, and on days like this there is only one thing to be done: go for broke and make a giant seething odiferous cauldron of mussels.
You know how to do this. Garlic shallots olive oil white wine maybe tomatoes, maybe saffron and cream if you want to get fancy which I rarely do. A vast quantity of delicious, sustainable, expensive in a mild way, beautiful glossy black-purple sea creatures which come so spanking-clean these days that they only need the barest rinse. All this goes together in a large, heavy hot pot until the mussels open up, then you dump those suckers in a bowl with some parsley and pepper flakes and pick and slurp to your heart's content, and have a lot of bread on hand for the sublime broth which appears with no effort from you, and ice cream afterward.
This is always good. Tonight's version was especially so because my mom sent me a little package of fennel pollen, which is the kind of "Top Chef" glamour ingredient against which I am biased by default. It turns out that fennel pollen is wonderful: it doesn't taste much like fennel but does taste sweet, antique, mysterious and slightly sinful, like if you took a bindle of it through airport security the sniffer dogs would point at you. It loves mussels and mussels love it, and mussels love me and I love them and also Ceej, and "Dexter", and white wine, and the newly-spotless cat, and the great blue fall.
This is what food and cooking and life are supposed to be like. I am thankful today.
Comments