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Just like the song, we're addicted to the L-word
1. Last night's dreams: something about espionage taking place on a chain of tiny, inhabited islands just off Two Lights State Park in Maine, which I like to think I'd remember from my childhood if they actually existed. (I would almost certainly have coveted some of the houses.) I swam out near dusk to find what had become of someone who'd disappeared; I found a house made of cormorant-colored slate filled with old books and faintly Vorticist woodcuts, a woman who came back hours before I expected her, rowing a boat with the name written under the waterline, and the tall, tow-haired man who was her enforcer, an Olympic bronze with a buzz-cut, reading mid-century children's books. There were shackles in the rock, as if they were accustomed to Andromedas. I woke before anything resolved, fell back asleep and somehow opium had introduced itself into the plot and the children's books had become the focus of the mystery. I didn't think the architecture had changed, but the neo-Gothic arches were definitely missing the first time around. I don't remember if anything was answered before I woke for good, or if that was no longer the point of the story.
2. Mission of Burma has a new music video: "Semi-Pseudo-Sort-Of Plan." Thank God for Billy Ruane.
3. Two summers ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks showed me Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996) without sufficiently warning me that it was porn. I had something of the same experience last night with Amanda Palmer's "Want It Back." The link said NSFW, but I think we meant it for different reasons.
4. Monday was my second anniversary withrushthatspeaks. Once again, we avoided attending a funeral: instead, we met in Harvard Square and greeted one another with books (David Byrne's How Music Works (2012), Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot né Lost Rivers of London (2011) and Steven Brust's Dragon (1998), because Rush wants to know if it actually works as an introduction to the series), spent an hour in the wooden hot tub at Inman Oasis, after which I could actually bend my head far enough forward that I didn't fail my meningitis check (no, I don't really think I have meningitis, but I'd been that stiff for over a week), and then we shared an evening of preposterously good food at Oleana, which we had found on Friday by reading the reviews in the restaurant section of the Boston Globe. We had a reservation for eight-thirty; they gave us a table at six-fifteen. They are tiny and by seven o'clock they were full and we were not shouting. That alone would have rated our respect, but then there was the warm bread with za'atar and the octopus and olive shish with carrot and fennel saganaki (which yielded the defining question of the evening: "How was the octopus fluffy?") and the bluefish in grape leaves—it mixed beautifully into a Turkish rice bowl—and the trout spanakopita, which I had determined to order from seeing it online and about which I am going to yell for a minute here, because I had been expecting spanakopita with trout in and I got an entire trout. Cleaned. Deboned. A crisply rich little hinge of trout skin left to one side. Stuffed with spanakopita. They had replaced the filo with AN ENTIRE TROUT.
Food that good really does stop time.
We need to learn how to make fennel caramel, because it came drizzled over Rush's beghrir with nectarines and ricotta brulée and we can't afford to eat at Oleana every week. The pistachio ma'amoul was perfectly tasty, but the sheep's milk panna cotta that accompanied it was the best I've eaten in my life and the rose-geranium granita tasted like nothing I ever have: flowers, intensely. On our way out we passed another couple, a pair of young men who were saying considering things like, "I've heard it's really good," so we yelled very definitive things like, "It's insanely good! Oh, my God! You should go in!" and they did. And we browsed at Lorem Ipsum in Inman Square, where Rush found a copy-to-hold of Iain Banks' Whit (1995), and we pre-shopped at Reliable Market in Union, where we now know we can buy enough dried soybeans to make our own tofu, and there were good stars over the nice small non-sketchy park on Walnut Street. I saw Rush home. The temperature had contracted sharply after dark: I put on the sweater I thought I'd been paranoid in packing when I left the house that afternoon. It does still make me happy to walk somewhere by myself at night when it's cold out. I hadn't been sure.
5. Before bed last night, I was re-reading Michael Powell's Million Dollar Movie (1992). It's upwards of six hundred pages and densely anecdotal, so I tend to find myself reading it in selections rather than all the way through at once. He writes of Pamela Brown, who is goddess-wild in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) and I only wish I'd seen her as the original Jennet Jourdemayne:
We made love all night. She was a wonderful lover. Her skin was a delicate shell pink, and the hair on her body was as red as the hair on her head. Her great eyes glowed in the darkness like a cat's. They were so large that she claimed that she could always see almost directly behind her, and I think she could, as wild animals do. We could always make love whenever we wanted to, and we always wanted to. We were lovers until the day she died.
That.
2. Mission of Burma has a new music video: "Semi-Pseudo-Sort-Of Plan." Thank God for Billy Ruane.
3. Two summers ago,
rushthatspeaks showed me Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996) without sufficiently warning me that it was porn. I had something of the same experience last night with Amanda Palmer's "Want It Back." The link said NSFW, but I think we meant it for different reasons.4. Monday was my second anniversary with
rushthatspeaks. Once again, we avoided attending a funeral: instead, we met in Harvard Square and greeted one another with books (David Byrne's How Music Works (2012), Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot né Lost Rivers of London (2011) and Steven Brust's Dragon (1998), because Rush wants to know if it actually works as an introduction to the series), spent an hour in the wooden hot tub at Inman Oasis, after which I could actually bend my head far enough forward that I didn't fail my meningitis check (no, I don't really think I have meningitis, but I'd been that stiff for over a week), and then we shared an evening of preposterously good food at Oleana, which we had found on Friday by reading the reviews in the restaurant section of the Boston Globe. We had a reservation for eight-thirty; they gave us a table at six-fifteen. They are tiny and by seven o'clock they were full and we were not shouting. That alone would have rated our respect, but then there was the warm bread with za'atar and the octopus and olive shish with carrot and fennel saganaki (which yielded the defining question of the evening: "How was the octopus fluffy?") and the bluefish in grape leaves—it mixed beautifully into a Turkish rice bowl—and the trout spanakopita, which I had determined to order from seeing it online and about which I am going to yell for a minute here, because I had been expecting spanakopita with trout in and I got an entire trout. Cleaned. Deboned. A crisply rich little hinge of trout skin left to one side. Stuffed with spanakopita. They had replaced the filo with AN ENTIRE TROUT.Food that good really does stop time.
We need to learn how to make fennel caramel, because it came drizzled over Rush's beghrir with nectarines and ricotta brulée and we can't afford to eat at Oleana every week. The pistachio ma'amoul was perfectly tasty, but the sheep's milk panna cotta that accompanied it was the best I've eaten in my life and the rose-geranium granita tasted like nothing I ever have: flowers, intensely. On our way out we passed another couple, a pair of young men who were saying considering things like, "I've heard it's really good," so we yelled very definitive things like, "It's insanely good! Oh, my God! You should go in!" and they did. And we browsed at Lorem Ipsum in Inman Square, where Rush found a copy-to-hold of Iain Banks' Whit (1995), and we pre-shopped at Reliable Market in Union, where we now know we can buy enough dried soybeans to make our own tofu, and there were good stars over the nice small non-sketchy park on Walnut Street. I saw Rush home. The temperature had contracted sharply after dark: I put on the sweater I thought I'd been paranoid in packing when I left the house that afternoon. It does still make me happy to walk somewhere by myself at night when it's cold out. I hadn't been sure.
5. Before bed last night, I was re-reading Michael Powell's Million Dollar Movie (1992). It's upwards of six hundred pages and densely anecdotal, so I tend to find myself reading it in selections rather than all the way through at once. He writes of Pamela Brown, who is goddess-wild in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) and I only wish I'd seen her as the original Jennet Jourdemayne:
We made love all night. She was a wonderful lover. Her skin was a delicate shell pink, and the hair on her body was as red as the hair on her head. Her great eyes glowed in the darkness like a cat's. They were so large that she claimed that she could always see almost directly behind her, and I think she could, as wild animals do. We could always make love whenever we wanted to, and we always wanted to. We were lovers until the day she died.
That.
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I should see that film again. I haven't since 2007.
That passage about her is amazing.
I can recommend both memoirs I've read by Michael Powell at this point, Million Dollar Movie and 200,000 Feet on Foula (1938), reprinted about twenty years ago under the much less interesting title of Edge of the World: The Making of a Film. I want the first volume of his autobiography—A Life in Movies (1986)—now.
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We wondered about that! Is that how it's commonly done?
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Okay, whether or not it was in Monday's caramel, that sounds like something we want to be cooking with.
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It's more than I had!
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The September issue of Martha Stewart Living has a recipe including a fennel syrup that could easily be made into caramel. They did it with fennel seeds in simple syrup. I don't have the issue with me, but you can find the mag on the newsstands (maybe) or library, or a recipe might be online. Maybe it was on one of the recipe cards, but I'm not sure. It is probably in the recipe index---I think they were putting it on fruit salad.
Fennel pollen is going to give a very different effect IMO. I'd go with the seeds, steeped/simmered in syrup.
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How did I not know about that Powell book??
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It was lovely.
How did I not know about that Powell book??
I found it by accident in McIntyre and Moore's of blessed memory; I've never seen the first volume in the wild. I'd love to read some of the scripts, but The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the only one that ever seems to have been published.
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Cheers to you and Rush.
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I have had some amazing food recently: everything at M3. I'm trying to remember the last time I had food of that complexity and surprisingness. (It's a word.) The trout came with a little cucumber salad to one side of the plate, which I did not eat because I am indifferent toward cucumber at best, but for another diner it would have added a cooler flavor and a crunchier, fresher texture; to the other was a little mound of avocado whipped with lemon juice with salmon caviar on top and that I left nothing of. Rush's bluefish was, seriously, a Turkish rice bowl: served in a stone pot like Korean bibimbap so that the rice formed that delicious savory crust on the bottom from the sizzling heat (we had just been talking about how you can order tahdig separately at some Persian restaurants, but here we didn't even have to ask) with pale sweet beets and redcurrants and some warm creamy sauce that we couldn't identify at the time; it turns out to have been terbiye, which I know better in its Greek variety as avgolemono. The bluefish had been made into dolma. The fish was neither too flaky nor too damp, but the corners of the grape leaves were crisp as if they had been grilled. They broke apart beautifully and the whole thing could have been eaten with chopsticks. Trying to mentally reverse-engineer the food was half the fun of eating it, especially since in so many cases we couldn't. See entire conversation about fennel.
Cheers to you and Rush.
Thank you!
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(My friend Rosie lives in Edinburgh, and she knows a man who did some emergency dental work on Amanda Palmer. AP and Gaiman often stay with him if they're visiting; Rosie ended up with a free backstage pass to one of their gigs and eventually found herself performing a story in front of Palmer. I think I might have used the words "you", "jammy", and "sod" when I found this out last week.)
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It's so good! You can't make five-spice powder without it.
The dream is fabulous too. "Cormorant-coloured slate": wow.
Thank you! I keep thinking my sleeping brain is better at plotting than I am.
Rosie ended up with a free backstage pass to one of their gigs and eventually found herself performing a story in front of Palmer. I think I might have used the words "you", "jammy", and "sod" when I found this out last week.
Everything about that story is awesome.
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I love this, and I think it holds up without any context. Perhaps it is a nonfiction micro-short story.
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If you want the phrase for anything, you're welcome to it.
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Me too!
Nine
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Hee. Thank you! I'll leave it on a flyer somewhere random but conspicuous.
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That dream is brilliant.
There were shackles in the rock, as if they were accustomed to Andromedas.
I love the way you describe this. I'm also glad you didn't wind up in them. Even in dreams, that tends to be alarming.
Happy Anniversary!
I'm glad you didn't fail your meningitis check. The food sounds delicious.
5.
That quote is wonderful. I'm glad there have been people of that sort in the world, even if I'll never meet anyone like. Thank you for the sharing of it.
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Thank you!
Thank you for the sharing of it.
See above to
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http://www.thespicehouse.com/spices/fennel-pollen
I truly think there's fennel caramel in the back end of one of the Food Arts recipe sections; if not, I think they're lifting it from the Troisgros brothers. Hang on. Now I have to find it.
Nope. It's Alain Ducasse by way of the incomparable Elisabeth Prueitt.
FENNEL POLLEN SALTED CARAMEL
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon fennel pollen
In a sauce pan, heat the sugar over medium until it begins to caramelize stirring occasionally.
When the sugar becomes caramel colored and is all dissolved, slowly pour in the cream. Be careful because it will boil and sometimes splatter. Continue stirring until it has been fully incorporated. If the caramel seizes up a little, continue to stir over the heat until it is liquid again.
Remove from heat and stir in the butter, salt and fennel pollen.
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. . . thank you.
(Of course it's almost as pricey as saffon! When have we ever wanted to make anything uncomplicated? Okay, we're making apricot fool this week and that has a grand total of three ingredients and a lot of stewing. But finding unsulfured apricots was stupidly harder than you'd think.)
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Would. Eat.
Hooray for Oleana.
Amen!
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All joy to you and
Nine
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Well, it's been quiet since then. Although I should write up the weird little B-noir
All joy to you and rushthatspeaks. May you write of one another as wonderfully as Powell did of Brown.
Thank you.
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Thank you!
We will cook food that good someday.
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From the girl & the fig's new book, PLATS DU JOUR; the girl & the fig's Journey Through the Seasons in Wine Country.
Several varieties of apples work brilliantly in this galette: Rome Beauty, William’s Pride, Crispin, and Gravenstein are our favorites. Many apples are interchangeable, but some are just right for eating while others are better suited for baking. For a savory twist, we added fennel seed to the caramel. To really gild the lily, serve the galette with caramel gelato and a pinch of Maldon Sea Salt.
Serve with a Tawny Port or a Madeira.
Fennel Caramel
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed, toasted and ground
Heat the sugar and 2 tablespoons of water in a non-reactive pan stirring constantly until the sugar is caramelized (amber colored), about 5 minutes.
Remove the sugar from the heat and add the cream, butter,
and fennel seed.
Stir until well incorporated.
The caramel can be made ahead and kept refrigerated for up to 1 week.
To reheat, place the caramel in a small saucepan and heat until warm and melted.
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You should look at your garden more often!
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The late planted purple bush beans are just getting interesting.