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You know how summer goes – at first it seems endless, and then several weeks disappear completely. We needed to spend not-enough time with dear friends who are suddenly leaving town; another had a significant birthday; there was a blissfully cool camping trip to the Catskills (also too short, which was actually fine because camping trips, to me, belong on the list with fish and house guests); we were part of a huge family party (for another significant birthday) on a Vermont day that turned out to be deliciously, heartbreakingly perfect (see sunset picture). Not to mention there have been some major shifts in thinking about the actual direction of our near future, which resulted in my planning and un-planning a schedule for Fall and beyond.

And suddenly, the glorious days of late summer are upon us! At last we get warm clear sunny days and cool nights, several at a time. Dark is creeping in a little early and the angle of the light is changing, bringing the bittersweet panic of summer ending just as it gets really good. CSA pickups are almost too heavy to carry home, and despite this summer’s several awful streaks of weather (first hail, then not enough rain, then too much rain) the market is just bursting with tomatoes and everything else…. August as usual is no less poignant for being predictable. Late summer feels like falling in love despite one’s better judgment.

In August, the nightshades are in ascendancy, with the brief novelty (at least in the Northeast) of eggplant and peppers, and tomatoes in almost ridiculous abundance. Zucchini (which we have officially eaten enough of to not mind it being relegated to a less-than-starring role) persists; the supply of onions and garlic seems, for the moment, inexhaustible.  Ratatouille is inevitable! And this is the sort of dish I love the most – truly seasonal, a yearly ritual.

Almost without meaning to, I’ve been creeping towards a “signature” version of Ratatouille for years. The first version stemmed from the purchase of my first major cookbook, Julia Child’s The Way to Cook (the purchase of which I remember as being a momentous splurge).  This was in the pre-internet days, when recipes were written on pieces of paper or enshrined in big, expensive, hard-back books. I coveted these cookbooks, which I could not afford, and spent many half-hours hiding behind shelves in bookstores, furtively scribbling notes on scraps of paper, in order to research and develop recipes for things I’d eaten in the restaurants where I worked. For years I tried to make off with my mother’s 2-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking on visits home (which, I pointed out, I hadn’t seen her use in years) to no avail. But finally I had my own Julia Child book – big and glossy and important.

During this era (the mid-to-late 90’s), Patricia Wells may have held court on the West Coast, with its glorious fresh produce year-round.  But Julia Child’s recipes were a culinary lifeline for us East-Coat, cash-strapped, Star-Market-Discount-Card-wielding post-graduate gourmands.  Here were ways to take what you could afford to buy on sale, and transform it into something wonderful. My first Ratatouille must have the result of peppers and eggplants being on sale the same week (zucchini was always cheap), but it became a semi-regular production, such that I remember once actually having a Julia sighting in the Brookline Star Market while buying the ingredients for this dish.  I felt an inner glow while I slowly wheeled my cart past hers, Ratatouille ingredients on board. (Julia Child had an apartment in Cambridge; I lived on the other end of town in Jamaica Plain. But this particular Star Market was the new and shiny flagship store in the area. It was a regular beat, along with Trader Joe’s, for foodies who didn’t have, or didn’t care to spend, the money for Whole Foods, which was just then beginning to take over.)

The funny thing is, it turns out that I never actually made Julia’s version, as it’s written in The Way to Cook. Even though I’ve thought for years now that this was the recipe I had been repeating, in fact, going back to the cookbook (which now sports a ripped jacket and many pages stained from use), I see that my early ratatouille was an actually adaptation of her technique, which I must have modified based on some other recipes I’d read or versions I’d tasted. Julia refers to Ratatouille as a “provencal eggplant casserole,” in which “the vegetables cook separately, then finish with a short communal simmer.” In her version, the eggplant and zucchini are roasted separately in large slices, then layered with an onion/tomato/pepper sauce (for which canned tomatoes are fine) and baked in the oven.  I suppose I’d always thought of ratatouille as having a more homogenous texture. So I adapted Julia’s version, cubing my eggplant and zucchini before following her instructions for roasting them separately in the oven and adding them into a cooked-down tomato and pepper sauce for a quick stovetop simmer. Experience taught that after a half-day or overnight of sitting, the flavors mingled well.  It was a pretty good ratatouille:  worth the work and worthy of becoming a dish I pulled out when there were guests to impress (and being that my boyfriend at the time was a chef, the guests usually knew what they were doing in the kitchen).

This was in the days before the concept of eating seasonally and locally really hit the East Coast. For a long time, Ratatouille was a winter dish for me (who wants to do all that roasting and simmering in the middle of summer?).  But my relationship with the dish completely changed the summer I had a very successful garden. The ingredients for Ratatouille were at hand (with supplements as needed from a farm stand 2 miles away) for weeks on end, and there was all that lovely produce to be used up. In the midst of canning tomatoes and dealing with an overabundance of zucchini, I made batch after batch of the stuff. Out of sheer exhaustion, and probably in deference to the hot August kitchen, I occasionally abandoned what I thought of as the “Julia Method” of roasting the zucchini and eggplant separately, and adopted the quick, rustic, down-‘n-dirty Elizabeth David method.  Hers leaves out zucchini, which I added with the eggplant in the middle. The recipe is so amazingly short that I will copy it here in its entirety:

“Peel the tomatoes and cut the unpeeled aubergines into squares. Slice the onions and Pimentos (peppers). Put the onions into a frying pan or sauté pan with plenty of oil, not too hot. When they are getting soft add first the pimentos and aubergines, and, ten minutes later, the tomatoes. The vegetables should not be fried, but stewed in the oil, so simmer in a covered pan for the first 30 minutes, uncovered for the last 10. By this time they should have absorbed most of the oil.”

That’s it – under one hour, one pan, and it’s done. With the fresh vegetables coming right from the garden, this was actually an acceptable version (if a little watery – the tomatoes gave a lot of liquid).

But that same summer I discovered my favorite late-summer cookbook, Lulu’s Provencal Kitchen (more on Lulu and my favorite recipes in an upcoming post).  She, like Julia, recommends that the vegetables should be “precooked, separately, each in a different way, before being assembled.” But her recipe goes on in quite a different way, specifying that they should then be “simmered together and reduced to a melting perfection in which some are dispersed and absorbed into the whole while others retain their individual identity.” Richard Olney’s prose brings the recipes of this formidable cook and hostess to amazingly specific life – he is a master at writing out details that allow you to get the essence of a dish. 

For me, there were several important notes in the ratatouille recipe. First, it is specified that the onions should be cooked over “very low heat…until they are melting and simmering in their own juices but uncolored.” Second was the note that in the final simmering, the vegetables should cook down “until all excess liquid has evaporated and the vegetables are coated in a syrupy sauce.” That consistency, far from a mixture of roasted vegetables or a loose watery stew, is what I was after.

My final version is an amalgamation of techniques. There are three very important aspects taken from Lulu’s version, with some things learned from Elizabeth David, and a touch from Julia.

The first Lulu/Elizabeth David technique is the initial cooking of the onions, continued with the cubed zucchini, at a very low temperature. It is important to allow these vegetables to stew slowly in the olive oil so that they will give their juices up, but gradually. Only if you cook the zucchini at a low temperature will it get tender without disintegrating. And the advantage of letting it do this in the pan where everything will end up (as opposed to roasting it separately) is that the zucchini (and onion) juices ultimately are kept so they can reduce down with the final tomatoes. Thus, the “syrup” at the end has the essence of all the vegetables. If you roast the zucchini separately, you give up all this wonderful juice, and you introduce quite a bit more olive oil into the dish. But the key is fairly large chunks (the recipe calls for them to be “quartered lengthwise then chopped into 3/4-inch pieces”) and very low temperatures.

The other important Lulu innovation is to roast the peppers. Having no wood coals from a grill, I simply char the peppers over a gas burner, then cool and then peel them (a process that Olney describes, incidentally, as being scorned by Lulu as “barbaric.” Whatever; I work with what I’ve got!) This eliminates several things I hate: pepper skins in my ratatouille, thinly slicing raw peppers, and waiting for the peppers to get soft in a sauté. Don’t ask me why I find this less annoying than burning my fingers while charring peppers over an open burner, but I do.

However, I don’t follow Lulu to the letter. I persist in the Julia method of salting eggplant slices to draw out some of their liquid before roasting them. I then persist in my own method (could I have gotten this idea from Cooks Illustrated? 2001 seems a little late, but it is plausible) of cubing the slices up, tossing with a small amount of olive oil, then quickly roasting them in the oven at 400 degrees. I find this keeps the eggplant from becoming mushy, and it absorbs quite a bit less oil if you salt it first.

Finally, the perfect ratatouille has resulted. I don’t think I’ll change a thing.  The recipe follows, with a blow-by-blow description of how I deal with the many steps and long periods of waiting around this method requires. Basically, do not make ratatouille if you are in a hurry. It’s best stretched out over a lazy morning at home, when you have a few non-pressing things to do. 

 

Perfect Ratatouille adapted from Lulu’s Provencal Kitchen

The amounts given for vegetable ingredients are approximate. Use what you have. Every batch is different!

 

• 1 very large or 2 small onions (a little under a pound)
• 3 large or 4 small cloves of garlic; more if you like
• 1 pound of zucchini (2 medium)
• 1 pound eggplant (1 medium-sized)
• 1.5-2 pounds tomatoes, preferably plum
• 3 long red peppers, or 2 red bell peppers (the ones we’ve gotten from Roxbury this summer have been great for this)
• dried or fresh thyme
• Olive Oil (about 1/2-2/3 cup total)

Directions:

• While you are waiting for your coffee to brew, boil a kettle of water for peeling the tomatoes. (This is an annoying job best done before you are fully awake.) Cut a cross in the bottom of each tomato, drop them in the boiling water for about 20 seconds, then pull out with a spoon and run under cold water to cool off. Peel the skins off with a knife, then you might as well core them, slice them into quarters, and push out the seeds. Roughly chop them, then set aside in a bowl. Since it’s so fun being in the kitchen before you are dressed, why not also start charring the peppers on a burner (“no pants, no pan” – that’s my motto for living on the edge)? And if the smoke alarm goes off, your spouse will finally get out of bed!
• At this point, you may come to your senses and go do some normal morning activities. In my case this is drinking coffee, then going for a 5-mile run.
• When you get back, the peppers and tomatoes are sitting there waiting for you. So, why not carry on? Slice up the onions (cut them in half, then slice thinly), and put them in a big heavy pot with some olive oil over very, very low heat. Peel, crush, and chop the garlic, then quarter the zucchini and chop into large cubes. Check on the onions, but they take a really long time, so nothing much will be going on there. This is a good time to slice the eggplant. Throw the slices into a colander in the sink and sprinkle with coarse salt. They need to sit for a while (about 30 minutes is good). Now you have about 20 minutes to kill. Cover the onions, keeping the heat on very low. This is a great time to send out a few overdue emails, catch up on blog reading, start the crossword, do the breakfast dishes…..just don’t forget to stir the onions once or twice, and at some point, preheat the oven to 400 degrees for the eggplant. 
• Now you can get a little more involved for about 15 or 20 minutes. Uncover the onions and raise the heat slightly, then throw the garlic and zucchini in. Stir to coat, and once the zuch is cooking nicely, turn that pan back down to quite low, leaving it uncovered. Cut the eggplant slices (which should have expelled a lot of brown liquid by now) into half-inch cubes, then toss them with a little olive oil on a baking sheet, and throw them into the preheated oven. (I don’t rinse the salt off. If you salt the onions and zucchini minimally, the little bit of salt from the eggplant makes it just about perfect).
• Keep stirring the zucchini, and stir the eggplant after 5 minutes (it should take 10-15 minutes total, don’t forget to check it!). Pull the eggplant out when the cubes are tender but not falling apart. Some may have browned, which is fine. Meanwhile, heat up a sauté pan with a little olive oil, and throw the cubed tomatoes in. Sprinkle with salt, then toss them and shake the pan over high heat until some of the liquid has evaporated but the cubes still hold their shape (Plum tomatoes do this best, other types may fall apart while there is still a lot of liquid. Not really a problem, keep reducing anyway).
• Peel the blackened skins off the roasted peppers (you may need to run under water), being careful not to break their flesh and lose their juices. Press the juices into a bowl, then seed and slice them.
• Now for the final simmer: if you’re using dried thyme, sprinkle it over the zucchini/onion mixture, which is still idling along in the big heavy pot. Pour in the slightly-reduced tomatoes, stir in the eggplant along with the peppers and their juices and get it to a slow simmer. (If you are using fresh thyme, tie a few branches together and throw in with the tomatoes.) Turn the pot down very low, and let it simmer away for about an hour, checking and stirring it from time to time to make sure nothing is sticking on the bottom. (More emails can get sent, pages written, dishes done, crossword finished and OpEd page read….). It’s done when you get that magic syrupy sauce.
• And, Voila! It’s 11 am, and you have perfect ratatouille. It’s best to turn it off and let it sit out on the stove ‘til dinner time. If you aren’t using it until the next day, you can put it in a glass bowl once it’s cool – don’t cover until it’s cool either way, or you’ll make your nice syrup all watery.

I love ratatouille served at room temperature, as side dish with almost anything. It’s particularly good with an omelet and some crusty garlic bread, with a salad on the side. It’s also a special treat with lamb that has been grilled with garlic and rosemary. And ratatouille is such a perfect excuse to bring out some exuberantly spicy red wine – the first cool nights of summer, coming as they do while we’re still indulging in the season’s freedom, are made for eating lamb and ratatouille and swigging back some slightly cool, fruity-spicy Provencal red (like Gigondas, or a good Cotes du Rhone). Would that this gorgeous season would last forever!

Of course we know it won’t, but happily Ratatouille freezes well. Long about your third batch, when you are getting a little tired of it, throw some in the freezer.  Won’t it be a wonderful treat in January?

 

I had sort of forgotten about cucumbers until the first cucumbers of the summer arrived in our weekly produce pickup two weeks ago, when we got 2. The following week, as is wont to happen with cucumbers, the production exploded and my husband came home from the pickup with 4 good-sized ones and a whopper.

Maybe it’s because we haven’t had cucumbers since last summer, but these cucumbers have been a revelation. The other night our salad at dinner was just a plate of sliced cucumbers – no salt, no dressing, not peeled.  Just a pile of cucumber slices.  And we sat there greedily stuffing the slices in our mouths as fast as we could and in between bites rhapsodizing about cucumbers, and how they are underrated, and how, with apologies to sweet corn and tomatoes, cucumbers really ought to be recognized as the defining vegetable of summer.

It’s true that where I grew up, in the mountains of Southern Vermont, cucumbers were much more common than corn on the cob and tomatoes in the summer. There isn’t a lot of flat fertile land around there to plant corn, let alone corn that is not destined to feed animals. Sure we bought and ate some corn in the summer, but I didn’t discover the delights of really fresh sweet corn was until I was in college in the Hudson Valley. I remember being shocked at how sweet it was (did someone put sugar on my corn?!), and how you could eat it practically raw, with no butter. Likewise with tomatoes – the growing season at my mom’s place is so short that lots of the tomatoes ended up ripening wrapped in newspaper in the basement. Vine-ripe tomatoes were definitely a treat, but not one I got to eat my fill of until later in life (when my Columbia County garden produced county-fair-winning-sized specimens for weeks on end; it is, in fact, possible to get tired of tomatoes).  

Cucumbers, however, were often available in abundance: if not in our garden, in a neighbor’s for sure. You know how it is with these vine-y plants – once they get started, look out! And because cucumbers don’t have the status of sweet corn or ripe tomatoes, people would give armloads of them to you almost apologetically.

So I do have fond childhood summer memories of cucumbers. But these cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are far more delicious even than the garden-grown ones that I remember.  Their taste is distinctly melon-y* and so pronounced that you can savor a bite for several minutes after. They are firm but crisp (even the whoppers); the skins are tough but tasty; the seeds are sweet. In short, they are such good cucumbers that it seems a shame to even add salt. 

The memory of these delicious cucumbers was in my head as I was doing some reading this week. Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament is a book I’ve read and heard about several times, most lately in the afternoon discussion at Polyface, which ranged into some far-flung philosophical, agricultural, and political territory. I made a note to actually find and read the book next time I got a chance.  And this week, an abundance of developing ideas in my head coupled with 90+-degree muggy summer weather seemed as good an excuse as any to a trip to the NYPL reading room (where I have whiled away many a hazy afternoon reading in government-funded air conditioned comfort. New Yorkers take note – here is a summer survival method much cheaper and more intellectually stimulating than the movies!). **

As inclined as we have become to dismiss the older works of recent agricultural history as relics, Howard’s work resonates uncannily.  Much of what he writes seems as if it could have been written last week – although of course this should come as no surprise. The development of land in monocultures and the use of chemical fertilizers was well under way by 1940, when An Agricultural Testament was published. (Liebig’s seminal book on agricultural chemistry, don’t forget, dates from 1840 – chemical fertilizers had been in development and use for nearly 100 years by the time Howard was working). So much damage had already been done to the world’s soils (the American Dust Bowl era springs to mind) and in the 1940’s Howard held out a not unreasonable hope that his work (and the work of his colleagues; he certainly wasn’t alone in pushing against monocultures and chemical fertilization) would have an effect on the way agriculture was practiced.

He makes as cogent case as any I’ve seen for the true costs of industrial agriculture:

If a cheap substitute for humus exists why not use it? … the use of such a substitute cannot be cheap because soil fertility — one of the most important assets of any country — is lost; because artificial plants, artificial animals, and artificial men are unhealthy and can only be protected from the parasites, whose duty it is to remove them, by means of poison sprays, vaccines, and serums and an expensive system of patent medicines, panel doctors, hospitals and so forth.  When the finance of crop production is considered together with that of the various social services which are needed to repair the consequences of an unsound agriculture, and when it is borne in mind that our greatest possession is a healthy, virile population, the cheapness of artificial manures disappears altogether.  In years to come chemical manures will be considered as one of the greatest follies of the industrial epoch (pp. 37-8).

While he does perhaps rather over-simplify the solution (along the lines of “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”; in Howard’s world the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything comes down to Compost and Compost Alone) the philosophy that he espouses – of creating a cycle of life and a therefore a living soil is still irreproachable. He argues strongly against the idea of soil-nutrition-by-the numbers:

The principle followed, based on the Liebig tradition, is that any deficiencies in the soil can be made up by the addition of suitable chemicals. This is based on a complete misconception of plant nutrition. It is superficial and fundamentally unsound. It takes no account of the life of the soil, including the mycorrhizal association — the living fungous bridge which connects soil and sap (p. 36).

He goes on to connect this to the nutritive value of crops grown with chemicals: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”  This might seem like a leap of crackpot intemperance, but the philosophy behind separating nourishment into a collection of separable chemical “nutrients” sounds an awful like how humans have been taught, recently, to think of what they eat. This leap – from “food” to “nutrients,” is well discussed in Pollan’s latest, In Defense of Food. (“From Food To Nutrients” is in fact the title of Chapter 1, and it goes on from there in good form to indict the modern “science” of nutritionism.  Read it if you haven’t.)  It makes sense that as we have ceased to think of our soils as living working systems, we have begun to think of what is grown there as merely a collection of nutrients. A series of nutrients in; a series of nutrients out. And as we have ceased to think of our soils and farms as living systems, so have we come to think in the same way about our food and our bodies. Our modern medical system has evolved (at great cost) to treat what might be considered symptoms as diseases in their own right.

Whether or not organically grown vegetables can be shown to be more nutritious than those grown with chemicals is still a matter of debate***, although the idea that food grown in healthy soils will just be, well, healthier, has a strong appeal to common sense.  (“Garbage in, garbage out” has applications that range far beyond computer programming). But nutritional analysis is, given the context, beside the point here.  As Howard writes in An Agricultural Testament, “It is an easy matter to distinguish vegetables raised on NPK. They are tough, leathery and fibrous: they also lack taste. In marked contrast those grown with humus are tender, brittle, and possess abundant flavor” (p. 82).  Case in point my crunchy, delicious cucumbers. Case in point the sweet onions, the firm and sweet-nutty zucchini, the jewel-like (and delicious) baby chard we had eaten earlier in the week.  It is not necessary to risk sounding like a natural-food-obsessed nut in this case – anyone could taste the difference between my organic Roxbury Farm produce and what comes from a supermarket (via an industrial, NPK-driven farm).

One of the biggest takeaways from my recent visit to Polyface farm was Joel Salatin saying, “Nature’s ability to heal is amazing.” Something not to be missed about Salatin (successful businessman and rock star of modern agriculture that he is) is that he sees his way of farming as, first and foremost, the way to heal the land that he loves and live the way that he wants to.  In this sense, the beef and eggs and chickens and pork his land yields are more like handily consumable byproducts than an end unto themselves.  And this is not “healing the land” or “saving the world” in a fleeting summer-after-college-internship-before-I-go-get-a-real-job sense – it was a real conviction and something we could easily see, touch, and taste when we were on that land. 

Similarly, the tasty cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are about a lot more than just a delicious (or more healthy) meal. Like Salatin, Jean-Paul and Jody see farming as much more than a simple input-output production mechanism.  They see farming as a series of relationships – of wild land to cultivated, of soil to crop, of farmer to eater (and hence city to country).  A cynical view could peg Salatin, Roxbury Farm, and many of the newly minted CSA’s and vendors at the NY City Greenmarket as “smart capitalists” who are just responding to a demand created by the latest food fad of the urban upper middle class.  But it goes much deeper than that.  Farming in this way is a completely different mission. When Jody wrote on the Roxbury blog the other week, “We are creating new communities that are not bound by close geographical or economic confines,” it was not some woo-woo abstraction or a way to make privileged city-dwellers feel good about their food choices. Instead, she was making a real observation about the difference between buying food as a financial transaction (dollars for donuts) and the way in which CSA members support the farm (paying in advance for whatever the season yields). Whether or not we get dirt under our nails, we are involved in what the farm produces: it is what fills up our refrigerators (or not) every week.

People like Salatin and the farmers at Roxbury are doing something of fundamental importance to our society, as they dissolve the separation between “country” (backwards) and “city” (progressive). They blow the image of the farmer as an uneducated “hick” who couldn’t make it in the white-collar world to smithereens. And what they are doing is not just about making a tastier cucumber or a better chicken. It is not just about “saving the planet” or “eating healthy.”  It’s about all that, but it is also about liberating one of most fundamental relationships we have from the realm of the merely economic. And the cucumbers (did I mention?) are totally delicious.

 

Just to get this out of the way, I will confess that I started making frittatas because I can’t make a decent omelet.  There was a time when I told myself that I should, must, would learn this impressive culinary skill.  But then I had the good fortune to marry a man who (among other laudable talents) can make perfect omelets.  This one skill on his part makes us a veritable Jack Sprat and his wife in the kitchen!

I will also say, in my defense, that I find the omelet genre a little limiting. Making good omelets requires restraint - very few ingredients, a nice paper-thin layer of eggs, precise technique and timing. When egg night comes around, it’s usually towards the hairy middle of the week when people are hungry, time is short, and ingredients are likely to be random. I’m more for pulling out anything that needs to be used up in the fridge and throwing it together in one convenient pan, with leftovers a bonus for tomorrow’s lunch.  Although I have blocked out specific memories of this, I’m pretty sure that early on in my cooking existence fritattas were just overly thick, failed omelets that I chucked under the broiler so they wouldn’t be runny.

In other words, this is not the sort of dish for which a recipe is required.  Like all dishes that can be called ‘peasant cuisine,’ it is the food equivalent of monkeys with typewriters.* Given a certain amount of time in a kitchen containing basic ingredients, one is bound eventually to throw eggs and some other things together in a skillet and discover that the only way to cook it through is to run it under the broiler at the end.  Finding that this is likely to taste good, and that the leftovers make a delicious lunch, practiced technique and variation will arise. 

I think I finally formalized my frittata skills into a genre the year I had a garden up in the Hudson Valley that produced copious amounts of Swiss chard. I remember processing sink-full after sink-full of the stuff. Chard freezes well (blanched, in bags) and thawed frozen chard is made for eggs. That winter there were quiches, there were these timbales, but above all there was chard frittata. (Incidentally the timbale link requires a resounding aside in favor of Swiss chard and Loire Cabernet Franc. Long may they live together! And the current Baudry Granges (2006) is so delicious.)

One of the other vegetables that seems made for frittata is zucchini (and its related squash friends).  Except that, unlike chard, the time for zucchini frittata is fleeting. That time is now-the beginning of the season, when zucchini are small, sweet, nutty and firm. It happily coincides with the beginning of new garlic (hoorah, hoorah!) and occurs before the relentless squash has become big and tiresome and something to hide in other dishes.

I had a wonderful zucchini frittata last Wednesday at Terroir. This was a restaurant I approached with a certain amount of trepidation-admittedly trepidation of the “not-wanting-to-belong-to-any-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member” sort. I had a friend meeting me who has a low hipster/bullshit threshold (as well as impeccable taste in wine) and who had had an extremely trying day. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for a restaurant to do things like having a whole page of Beaujolais (served at the right temperature) and only serving Riesling by the glass all summer (with Tshirts to prove it) without all the wine geekdom crescendoing into a cooler-than-thou, wink-wink, mildly threatening roar. I came prepared to flee if necessary. 

Fleeing was not necessary.  Apparently the feat is possible, and the zucchini frittata was a clincher.  It was thick and brown and homely and garlicky and full of good olive oil and zucchini. The bread alongside was crusty and the slice was generous. This hearty, simple, delicious and unpretentious foodstuff cast the proclamations of the menu and wine list in a kind and gleeful light. I allowed myself to covet the “Phylloxera” sticker on one of the wine list binders. (Imagine, if you will, the word Phylloxera printed in rococo script, like the name of a 1980’s hair/metal band, white on a black background…. Having just spent several weeks perusing the history of scholarly research on phylloxera for a Botany paper I found this simply hil-larious.)** We ordered a bunch more food (the paninis are superlative as declared, although the fried lamb was declared an “enh” by all), we drank a bottle of deliciously ethereal Beaujolais (Cheysson Chiroubles 2004), and the bill was not, by New York standards, horrendous.

I found myself still relishing that zucchini frittata two days later, and so I made myself a version with summer squash and fresh garlic (topped with a sprinkle of my new favorite condiment for everything egg-related) for lunch. And this, too, was delicious.

 

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* See for Documentation The Silver Spoon, which I treasure for its beautifully concise three-ingredient-per recipe, three-recipes-per-page format (all of which assume a level of technique gained from a life heretofore of watching other people cook) and unpretentiously monotonous photographic style. All of which, and its heft, annoys some people about this book, but which makes me love it (and the heft, I find, is also useful for pressing botanical specimens.)

 

 

 

** I refrained from obtaining photographic evidence; I think taking pictures of one’s food (and other stuff) in restaurants is absolutely annoying and detrimental to proper enjoyment.  This is what I never, ever, want my life to come to, blog or no.