With one too many meals consumed hurriedly in front of a computer for the last two weeks, this weekend we issued a corrective.
Friday night to Lula, my favorite restaurant in all the land, where we dined on an appetizer of pan seared sea scallops with fiddlehead ferns, pinenuts, sorrel and mandarin; (my entree) stinging nettle, farro, green and white asparagus, young garlic, hazelnuts, and poached farm egg 'noisette'; (J's) lake superior whitefish with morel mushrooms, dandelion greens, walnuts and applewood bacon. I had a taste of the whitefish which I usually love but all I tasted was bacon, which I haven't eaten in years and now I realize I have not missed at all. Dessert was a jasmine rice pudding with mandarine champagne broth and lavender, a nice sweet finish to a meal that was wholly satisfying. We had a white wine with this meal that was good, but not memorable.
Saturday morning I woke up at 6 and bicycled to the Green City Market in Lincoln Park. The weather was pristine and I walked about as the vendors arrived and set up, beating the post-8 a.m. crowd and finding a lot of opportunity to talk with the growers. Fresh strawberries and rhubarb were in abundance and I tried to imagine some time this week to bake with them, but 4 deadlines in the next 7 days say nein. I still brought a few stalks of rhubarb for J, since he recalls it growing in abundance in his yard growing up and ate it raw with a little sugar. But, I wonder, isn't this a plant with a toxicity caveat? Without having much of a cooking plan, I did pack a bag full of things that could be quickly stir-fried in the next few evenings: purple asparagus (growers were saying this could be asparagus's last week), wild watercress, some greens called Spignorello which I'd never heard of before, fresh mint, flat-leaf parsley, blush-red turnips. was also tempted by the armloads of young garlic and spring onions and their three foot long tender greens, but they looked like they might be around next time, and the nano-greens (arugula sprouts, sunflower sprouts, etc.). A fresh baguette, a jar of apple butter, a bouquet of peonies and a tomato, cheese and herb crepe made and eaten on the spot rounded out my morning's entertainment.
Bicycling home wasn't too difficult, but getting back baskets is clearly in order if my grocery shopping is to exceed one shoulderbag-full.
A last minute dinner with an old friend inspired me to attempt a re-creation of Lula's stinging nettle and farro with watercress and wild rice instead. For young garlic, old garlic; for hazelnuts, pinenuts; for green asparagus, purple asparagus, etc. It came together in a similar presentation, but ultimately the garlic broth that tied it all together was lacking a little punch, or salt, or maybe it was miso it needed. In any case, we all felt quite energized afterwards we took a long(ish) walk to Margie's (the wait at 10 pm. to eat dessert at Hot Chocolate was 2 hours! That's a Brooklyn wait, so screw that) for an ice-cream cone to go (crowds were waiting outside for one of the few booths to open up, definitely a place to return to for the full-on banana split in the clam-shell bowl. The atmosphere made me mourn something I hadn't realized had been so completely lost from my youth when those old joints from the 1920's were still in service and hardly exceptional.)
One more note on a redemptive 24 hours of food and relaxation: two excellent wine recommendations from the outpost down the street where the owner is incrementally enlarging my wine education and has never steered us wrong in the dozen bottles we've drunk in the short time his store has been open. La Cappuccina 2005 Soave proved to be a refreshing glass by itself, and paired well with the white bean pate that preceded last night's dinner and with the garlic-infused and bitter-astringent greens and nuttiness of my watercress and wild rice experiment. Later, the perfectly proportioned red J picked out was an easy drinker, excelling in all the characters he and I like in a red: not too full-bodied, but dry with a bit of earthiness and spice. That one's the Abad Dom Bueno Roble.
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