Just like the song, we're addicted to the L-word

[sovay]

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, 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.

Comments

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it isn't fennel pollen in the caramel.

[sovay]

I wonder if it isn't fennel pollen in the caramel.

We wondered about that! Is that how it's commonly done?

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

I don't know; but I suspect some sort of reduction of fennel bulb would have that "cooked" flavour that you want to avoid. But I experimented with letting our fennel go to flower, and I found a kind of anisette intensity in the pollen that survived cooking as an aroma, rather than a cloying sweetness.

[sovay]

But I experimented with letting our fennel go to flower, and I found a kind of anisette intensity in the pollen that survived cooking as an aroma, rather than a cloying sweetness.

Okay, whether or not it was in Monday's caramel, that sounds like something we want to be cooking with.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

Hm... I know it's available in the U.S. market; I've heard tell there's an island off California where most of it is gathered for domestic consumption. But it's not a thing I know hide nor hair of. Apparently, the best comes from a variety of fennel that isn't primarily known for eating, but I took mine from a regular sweet Italian variety we'd been growing for its bulbs. That, I think, it the sum of my knowledge on the subject.

[sovay]

Apparently, the best comes from a variety of fennel that isn't primarily known for eating, but I took mine from a regular sweet Italian variety we'd been growing for its bulbs. That, I think, it the sum of my knowledge on the subject.

It's more than I had!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's the kind we used to have in the garden? That definitely didn't bulb.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Maybe they did it with the seeds or fennel tea?

[sovay]

Maybe they did it with the seeds or fennel tea?

strange_selkie posted a recipe with pollen below, but if you have any suggestions about cooking with fennel tea, I'd love to hear them!

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Just remembered.

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.