Days of Heat and Salad

Dear Elise,
This is what it said on the news today.

A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. A HEAT ADVISORY MEANS THAT A PERIOD OF EXCESSIVE HEAT IS
EXPECTED. THE COMBINATION OF TEMPERATURES IN THE MID TO UPPER 90S
AND HIGH HUMIDITY WILL CREATE A SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES
ARE POSSIBLE. THE ELDERLY, YOUNG CHILDREN AND PETS ARE MOST AT
RISK. CHECK UP ON RELATIVES AND NEIGHBORS.

The thing is, it has said that for the past three days. The only reason they call the Heat Advisory off at midnight is that the day is over. The new Heat Advisory starts at 12 AM tomorrow.
It is suddenly salad days. (Do you remember Suddenly Salad!? It was a pasta salad/dressing mix combination that was sold together. You cooked the pasta and mixed the dressing pack with oil or mayo and presto, Suddenly Salad! I liked the ads bc the woman always looked so pleased and surprised by the suddenness of the salad.)
I made a tuna salad from The Barefoot Contessa, (yes, I know how you feel about her, but she suits me. I very often don't know how much mayo and celery to add to the shrimp to make shrimp salad and it can start to feel like Sudoku, one mistake cascading into many more until I have to delete the whole thing or throw the salad in the trash, and peeling and deveining a lb of shrimp is about as tedious and tiresome as those wild stabs in the dark when there are too many empty boxes in Sudoku.)
This salad had rare seared tuna which we really shouldn't be eating. There are as many reasons not to eat rare seared tuna as there are ingredients in the salad. 1. it's endangered, 2. it could be dosed with radiation from Japan, 3. it is FULL of mercury, 4. it could contain parasites, (mom's friend's son just got two different parasites from eating sushi and they so compromised his immune system he has had to undergo repeated hospitalizations and now has chronic fatigue syndrome.) 5. the dolphins.
Tuna, lime juice, avocados, wasabi, scallions, tamari, Tabasco. OK, two more reasons not to eat tuna, 6. carbon foot print, 7. it's gross.
Actually, it wasn't gross. It was really good. I served it with a sushi rice salad, many of the same flavors and also pickled ginger.
I served it to friends and they loved it. I was busy with entertaining anxiety (entertaining my social anxiety) and didn't think to take a picture.
Then, the same friends came over and we were still having a heat advisory, so I started obsessing about watermelon salad.
Watermelon, oil, lemon juice, cayenne, salt, mint, olives, feta, sweet onions. Suddenly Swirly!
It was good but in a troubling way, watermelon and olives are just so far apart that one is made uneasy by their miscegenation. So even though it was very tasty, and everyone voluntarily had seconds, I ended up throwing away the leftovers. By the next day I was just too unsettled by the whole thing. And I'm not in a hurry to make it again. Unless I'm invited to a party by people who I don't like but still want to impress. And really, that never happens. Those people never invite me anywhere. But perhaps if the Heat Advisory continues, they'll come check up on me.

When in Rome

Hi Marg,

We've been having a great time in Italy, and have fully adapted to the Italian practice of eating late and consequently, rising late. Last night we went out to dinner with Clare and didn't even leave the house to begin the half hour drive to the restaurant until 8. And that seemed normal. Dinner usually takes at least 2 hours, so we rarely get home before 11:30 on the nights we go out. We are on vacation so we can sleep in, but how do the Italians do it? I can't imagine.

Even in vacation mode, it's sometimes nice to eat at home, on the early side. The agriturismo (rental on a farm) where we are staying doesn't have an oven or a grill so we are limited to the stove top. I turned some lovely looking pork chops into shoe leather before deciding there's a reason why pasta is so big here.

I've made a few pasta dishes, all of which seem remarkably similar. Variations on a theme - pasta, cheese (ricotta, mozzarella, parmigiano), fresh tomatoes, and something green (arugula, zucchini, basil, etc). Depending on the green I either saute it in olive oil with a little garlic or just toss it in with the hot pasta at the end.

Here's the general idea:
Cook the pasta, reserve some pasta cooking water.
Toss the hot pasta with the greens, tomatoes (diced) and cheese.
Add a bit of the pasta water and some olive oil, salt and pepper and stir until it's combined. Add mroe pasta water if necessary.
Eat.
Leave the kitchen and let your dinner companion do the dishes.

Works every time.

Love, Elise

check this out

Dinner on the L train to Brooklyn - wow!

NY Times Article on Sugar is Toxic

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Hi Elise,
OK, the NYTimes Magazine published an article called Is Sugar Toxic. And we agreed not to read it. But then The Ethicist was inane (actually the ethicist said that something very similar to something I had done, was, in fact unethical) and Frank Rich is no more and the sugar article was #1 on the list of Most-E-Mailed Articles so I started to peruse it. Apparently sugar, in sufficient quantities, is toxic and I had to read the entire article to determine just what the sufficient quantity is, or really, what the insufficient quantity is. I want to know the maximum amount of sugar I can consume that will still be insufficiently toxic.
The writer doesn't say. More research is apparently needed. At one point, he says that health experts would be thrilled if we all returned to the good old level of 40 lbs a year. Sounds like plenty, right? Pass me those mini-eggs. Actually, 40 lbs a year is only 200 calories a day. That doesn't sound like very much. I guess I'll only have 2 mini-eggs.

If I'm going to limit myself to 200 calories a day, well, I'm going to need to ease into this, start slow, cut back over time. And I'm going to have to figure out how many sugar calories are in everything I eat. That chocolate cake for instance, how many of the calories come from fat? I would have to look at the recipe, do some math, how many tablespoons in a cup, how many cups of sugar in the cake? In the frosting? Then divide that number by the number of pieces I'll eat in one day. And what if I want to have just a sliver before bed, two bites in the morning. That's a lot of math. Then I would have to do that for everything I baked. And if there were chocolate chips in the cookie, that would require research (how many sugar calories in a chocolate chip ? In 3 oz. of bittersweet chocolate? I guess I could start baking exclusively with unsweetened chocolate) and even more math. I'm going to need a few more mini-eggs before I get started.

Chocolate Cake

Amos: don't you want to document it before I cut it?
Elise: no, it's just a chocolate cake.

Actually, no. This is cake nirvana. Cake bliss. Cake ecstasy. Cake heaven. Cake ambrosia. Cake luxury. Cake silk. Cake cashmere. Cake vicuna.

This is cake that makes you wish you had a hole in your stomach so you could just keep putting more and more in without getting full. But cake that is so amazingly good that you don't want to eat more than one piece because you don't want to spoil the perfect memory of it. Cake that makes you think dark thoughts about your husband when he walks anywhere near the side of the kitchen where it is. Cake that makes the newly gluten-free masses curse their mothers and throw their better selves overboard as they reach for a forkful, just another forkful.

Cake: Rosie's Famous Sour Cream Cake Layers from Rosie's All Butter, Fresh Cream, etc, etc

Frosting: one of the ones from the white Silver Palate - chocolate chips, butter, heavy cream and powdered sugar. I made two batches and used the leftover to make fudge.

Feeling Blue

I bought blue potatoes at the farmers market last week. The potato seller has a bushy dark beard, a big smile and a rainbow colored hand knit hat. He always recognizes me and we chat about the 17 different kinds of potatoes he grows and what each is best for. When I steamed a variety that he had said was best for frying  he said, well duh. I never did take direction well, as you know. 

The blue potatoes perhaps shouldn't have been mashed but I couldn't resist. They looked weird but tasted great. 

Remember this?

 Sure wish I had some now...