La Fleur

“You’re just there for the food,” the young woman I’m presently living with said to me between forkfuls of ceviche when I told her I had started binging on  "The Bear.”  

That’s not entirely true. I’m also there for Chicago (my city, my lake) and for the writing. Those composing the show's dialogue know how to keep the profundity within the limits of the characters: Carmen can tell the truth knowingly, particularly with in the context of Al-Anon meetings at the Near North church, but Richie can only betray insight as an accident. It reads true. The only problem I’ve seen so far is Syd and Carmy solving two different dishes with cherries in quick succession, something they’d never do.

Okay, yes, it’s fair to assume I’m taking note of the cooking, sometimes slowing the tape to figure out the use of an ingredient. There’s a fish composition I’m planning to try based on a dish cooked at home by Syd in the first season – a seared bass laid atop a rich broth dotted with caramelized cherry tomatoes and carrots, laced at the end with fresh herbs and good olive oil.

When close friends hear of the latest things I can’t eat, they express the kind of sympathy normally reserved for the loss of a beloved pet. That’s because they know how I feel about food. But to be honest, it hasn’t been that hard cutting out most sugars and carbohydrates.

That’s partly because I feel so much better off them. I think my brother is right in observing you first (via “natural” selection) grow the bacteria that likes what you are eating, and then those buggers tell your brain to send more of same. (He joked his bacteria have him in a polysorbate-80 loop.) But it is not too hard to fight the bacteria you’ve grown if it’s troubling you quite a lot.  At least that’s true for me. I am in so much better shape gut-wise, I’m not much missing carbs and sugar. And I’m convinced I’m on my way finally to a LTR with the good bugs.

Of course, it’s also been easy cutting out most sugar and carbs because I have spent a lifetime having to self-discipline around food, and I learned so long ago how much is still left to me even after the latest cuts. This would all be very tough if I did not have money and time and cooking skills, but I have all of those.

So it is I am very happy to make  a morning meal of chia pudding with good sliced strawberries. To clarify what works, I’ve been eating the chia without so much as vanilla extract – just the tiny seeds plus unsweetened soy milk (only soy beans + water) or nut milk (only nuts + water). Walnut milk turns out to be very low in carbs and to give the chia quite a deep flavor, flavoring the strawberries as if I had cut them on a good wood board, so I’ve been using that when I can find it. I think when I get back home, I will see how it is to add some bitters – orange, grapefruit, black walnut – the kind they sell for fancy cocktails, as I think it will make for an interesting two-step dance with the chia.

It was many years ago I discovered a breakfast in Venice (California) that provided oats laced in cocoa nibs and unsweetened coconut shavings – how luxuriously that vacation breakfast did recline in my mouth! So I realized recently that the Askinose unsweetened chocolate I’ve been eating as a late-night dessert should really be had at breakfast, when I’m wanting savory. (Because unsweetened chocolate is always going to be a savory.) So now, instead of just a piece of fruit before my early morning run, I have a little fruit with two squares of the good stuff. It tastes so soulful, I’m convinced it must be some kind of cure.

A perfectly composed dish is a joy forever – or as long as the memory of the  mouthfeel lasts – but the truth is that a real foodie can be quite satisfied by a single ingredient. The best walnuts, for example, or a pull of Genovese basil off a potted plant. To call a one-ingredient meal simple is to miss the complexity of a ready, sun-warmed peach or pomegranate, a strip of perfectly smoked salmon,  a spoon of maple syrup that’s spent a few months in an old bourbon barrel.

Do I welcome the chance to combine delights and serve? Of course. Not least because those who really get it become my spies, reporting back on where to procure.

Sure, it can become a little ridiculous, the questing. Driving an extra hour for better blueberries, or scheduling my meat purchases around when Scott will be in the parking lot of Valley Court with his trunk open. But it’s worth it. When I told Bobby to just get Scott’s bacon, Bobby did and fried it up and served it to his wife only to have her immediately demand his sourcing with the tone of Trump on WaPo. The chicken can be a little tough for the pan, but there is no broth as fine as that rendered from Scott’s premenopausal layers.

Is it any wonder Ellen told me to be sure to get to Truro to the Atlantic Spice Company? I need ground cumin and coriander anyway to make the peanut-coconut sauce that will go on the grilled eggplant and peppers. And I expect they will have good olives, too. It will count as my treat today, after I dutifully produce 3,000 words of an intro and/or first chapter at the public library.

In the meantime I have decided to pour the leftover Sauternes  into the two-thirds-empty bottle of tangerine vinegar to see what happens on that blind date. If they click, I have a hunch about how the union might do with a parsnip mash for scallops. Not that I’m sure I can get parsnips here, but I could always try delicata instead. I can definitely get good scallops, and that's a time-limited opp.

Are there really so few things left to me? Only at the mall, at the airport, at a church supper. Like the squirrel under the hickory tree, like the bluejay in the grape arbor, like the fat bear in the salmon run, I am not suffering.