Eli is currently off traipsing around the fjords in western Norway. Yes, not even two whole months since we returned from Asia, and he’s off again! Solo this time, as I am soon off on my own trip to visit this very special person:
My sweet little niecelet!
But I digress. Since Eli is gone and has taken his picky dietary restrictions with him (good luck with that lutefisk, by the way!), I have been hard at work laboring over strange meats and brews that are more to my liking*. For starters, earlier this week I went over to my friend Marie’s house and had some lovely gazpacho while we made ricotta from scratch – using goat milk she had collected herself! And then yesterday, I made this:
Pate de campagne, using a recipe from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.
My roommates make fun of me because I tend to make things that are “high effort, low return.” I guess if you’re thinking in terms of sheer volume, that’s true (though this recipe, even halved, yielded enough pate to feed an army of hungry Frenchmen). Obviously quality isn’t factored into that viewpoint. Sure I could heat maybe fifty cans of Progresso in the time it takes me to make a chicken soup from scratch. But the latter is going to taste better and make me feel better too.
What you can’t get from a can: the slow, methodical ripples across the surface of barely simmering water. Eddies of foam rising from the submerged chicken. The aroma of poultry and water-infused with bouquet garni that permeates the house, subtler and gentler than the reek of scalded autolyzed yeast extract nuked at high heat – more akin to a mother’s touch. The heat that envelopes both you and the chicken, radiating from the pot.
Cooking things from scratch is not unlike performing a bit of magic, or kitchen sorcery. Especially when that preparation involves steps that seem absolutely silly to outside observers like my roommates. I needed a weight to press the pate into its final form, so I scoured the yard yesterday searching for a cleanish brick.
As I stood in the yard, hosing mud off the brick and watching traffic pass by, I thought to myself, “well, this is certainly something I have never thought to do for the sake of food before.”
* -ah, who am I kidding, I do this sort of stuff when he’s here, too. I just have to hear a bit more whining about it!
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Sometimes, when I’m in the kitchen and I look around after having feasted on a meal or a dish that took me most of the afternoon ( or the day and night before) to create, and just look at the mess I’ve made and the work still to be done, I smile to myself and wonder: what do all the other people around this town do with all this time they AREN’T in the kitchen? More time to cook = my favorite reason to ditch cable TV.
Drop by tonight if you have the time, there’s plenty of excess pate :)
Mmm food alchemy!
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