The second part in a series about the difference between cooking and other housework.
Eating in restaurants is my favorite entertainment. I love the whole process of checking coats and sitting down and examining a menu and listening to the waiter recite the daily specials. I love receiving the courses, one by one, especially if it's one of those restaurants that is famous for attractive presentation, so that each dish is a little jewel or architectural marvel. I love the whole ritual of dessert and coffee at the end. Mark knows this and never gets me any birthday or anniversary present that isn't a dinner out. Once, I kid you not, I looked at a menu and it was so lovely and ambitious that tears of appreciation welled up in my eyes.
I read a lot of restaurant reviews, too. We don't go out as often as I would, theoretically, like (in practice, with the two little ones, it is sometimes difficult, and we don't want to spend as much money as that would entail!) but I still can appreciate the experiences vicariously.
This morning, I looked at my menu plan ("pan fried steak, leftover roast squash, green veg, peppers and onions")---I wrote that Sunday when I was making the grocery list. The meal began in my imagination and I will think of it several times today before four o'clock, when I enter the kitchen to prepare it.
First I thought of the squash, butternut. I roasted it yesterday in Hannah's oven, cut side up, rubbed with a little unsalted butter. (I buy Pastureland brand butter. The cows are grass-fed.) Today, I decided, I will saute onions and carrots, simmer them in chicken stock, add the squash and puree it to make a velvety soup. (The texture of butternut squash soup is unbelievable; you would swear it was full of cream, or egg yolks or something.)
Then my mind turned to the steak. (Formerly a hormone-free, grain-fed and pastured steer that belonged to my in-laws' neighbor.) I already know I am going to pan-roast it with butter or olive oil, because the grill is buried in snow and I never get it done properly under the broiler. The question is how to sauce and flavor it. Lots of black pepper pressed into the meat? Quick reduction sauce? If so, a simple one with leftover beef stock and a little butter, or a more complex one with red wine boiled down to a syrup? I had some cream (Cedar Summit Farm brand, grass-fed cows again), but I hoarded it too long and it's gone bad, so I won't use that... Maybe I'll just add some balsamic vinegar to the peppers and onions, let them cook down to a marmalade and top the steak with that. In that case, definitely olive oil, not butter.
And so on, and so on. I haven't even looked in my refrigerator yet to find out what the "green veg" IS, but whatever it is I will probably just steam it.
Sometimes I aim the dish to please me, sometimes I aim it at one of my children (Oscar loves stewed tomatoes, for example), and sometimes I aim it at Mark. Once before we were married, in my apartment in Columbus, I made an invented dish of chicken marinated in balsamic vinegar and rosemary and sauteed, with a pan sauce made from the vinegar and some butter; he took one bite, looked amazed and told me "Dear, you are an excellent cook," and I've been trying to get that expresssion on his face again ever since. Occasionally, I think, I've almost got it.
Cooking pleases my family, it engages my imagination, it reminds me of romance, it allies me (in my mind anyway) with the people behind the swinging kitchen door of my favorite places to go. No wonder I love it. It's hard to imagine feeling that way about mopping the floor.
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