Irrelevant Grandeur

Do you ever have that feeling like you just want to plunge both hands deep into your chest cavity and fall backwards off a high cliff as the only possible means of successfully counteracting the catastrophic forward momentum in your life?! Me either. Summer is over; it's fall. Among the things winding down aside from seasons and friendships are my first year in New York City and the Roaring Camp song on my computer from the original AGCS Summer Mixtape. Perfectly Appropriate.

I made this dish weeks ago, when summer corn was still all the rage at the Farmer's Market and a large batch of garden-fresh tomatoes had just been brought to me by a co-worker from his parents home in Virginia. It was a spectacular conclusion to the sweetness of summertime, so fresh that I didn't even cook the corn all the way down before rolling it out of the pan and onto the plate. If you're looking for an easy way to clean out the vegetables in your pantry (in order to make room for things like spice jars full of cinnamon, canned pumpkin and fleshy halves of acorn squash, of course) I really think you should go for this recipe!

You Will Need:
Corn
Tomatoes
Fresh Basil
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
Mushrooms

To Make:
As usual, so easy it's painful. Heat a tablespoon or so of olive oil over low heat, add a few sliced mushrooms. Let them cook down for about three minutes. Dice up your tomatoes (as many as you please!) and drop them in with the mushrooms. Add your spices and let them meditate over the warmth for awhile, soaking up the flavors. Everything should be awfully juicy and smelling pretty nicely at this point. Then toss in some handfuls of freshly shucked corn. Stir everything together, cover, and let simmer down for five to seven minutes. At the end-point, the corn should be cooked down but still have retained a little bit of its crunch. Serve immediately! Enjoy.

Summertime Soul, Volume 1

I don't know what I am going to do when summer is over. Frequent, easy, and rewarding access to my neighborhood Greenmarket has completely spoiled me. No longer do I discuss foods in combination with each other("meals" if you will), but rather as entirely independent beings with no need nor desire to maneuver around one another within a single dish.

Whole, fresh heirloom tomatoes straight from the vine. Hunks of unblemished, ripe, yellow mango. Avocado scraped directly from the shell. Peaches, apples, and plums. Eggplants! Does this all sound familiar? It should! If not creative, it is certainly satisfying.

In an effort to recapture the spirit of cooking ambitions past, I recently took all of these things fresh from the Farmer's Market, slapped them together between two pieces of bread, and called it a 'sandwich'. I know that it's borderline ridiculous to post this as a "recipe", but the gooey, toothy mess of delicious that it produced was too good not to share. So, without further ado, let me infringe on your conscious with the Eggplant-Avocado Sandwich.



Eggplant-Avocado Sandwich

You Will Need:
1/2 avocado
Hummus
Eggplant
Tomato
Mustard
1 tbs. olive oil
Salt+Pepper to taste

(That's IT!)

To Make:

Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Slice the eggplant, brush it with olive oil, and arrange it in a baking dish. Pop it in the oven. Smear your bread with hearty portions of hummus and mustard. Add wedges of avocado and tomato to that, contributing a dash of salt and pepper just for fun. After the eggplant has been baked soft, remove it from the oven and let it cool for a second. Then layer it on top of the avocado and tomato, and smash everything together immediately. With any luck, the eggplant will still be warm when you start to eat.





(If applicable, lay in sunny park during consumption.)

Spoiled rotten, I tells ya!

best in show

Food is a lovely thing. On more than one occasion--embarrassingly more--the stoop-shouldered slope of a bell pepper's top will swoon me to the point that I'll be late for work. Literally late for work. It turns out that I'm helpless in admiration of the evolutionary tactics that nature has employed in order to make what's edible appealing. Lustrous, yellow-skinned summer squashes, eggplants thick and fleshy, ebony with ripeness, garlic bulbs puckered from heat and oil into tiny brown kisses. The feast is entirely visual before it is edible.

In my perfect world, eating would always be composed of these three parts: careful preparation, ensuing admiration, and then celebratory consumption. It seems sadly more often than not that food is lost beneath the noise and traffic of restaurants; it moves effortlessly into our awareness and is just as easily swept back out again, a carousel of aroma with the occasional nutritive benefit. The diner entertains no relationship to the individual ingredient and the vibrant space between kitchen and table is plunged into darkness.

I take great enjoyment from the private illumination of this realm. To know how something smells, appears, and feels before it is coaxed into relationship with a half dozen others of its kind. As a result, I know that a lot of what I cook seems unforgivably dull at first glance. The eggplant pictured below was simply sliced in half and baked with garlic cloves at 350 degrees until it was soft. The squash was sliced, layered, coated in olive oil and fresh herbs, and then baked as well. The cross-section of fresh pepper above just happened to catch the light coming through my window when it was on its way to my mouth. You see? It's not that I'm eating plainly! It's that I am partaking in a prolonged and thorough study of food appreciation. Huzzah huzzah!