Wednesday, August 06, 2003

This is just to say. . . . . . that there are "relentless" bloggers, who manage to write every day.  And then there are the slow thinkers, like me.  If I write every day, the writing threatens to turn into a litany of complaints caused by circumstantial things (the weather, my frustration with the wine industry, the necessity of having a job that doesn't always excite, the exhausting City). These things can be an interesting subtext, I suppose, but I'm not sure that they don't subtract, rather than add, to what it is I want to do (which is to write about wine and food with honesty).  Also I tend to fly off the handle and criticize where perhaps I have no right to, then feel bad.  (Ah, the agony of the ill-considered remark!) So maybe blogging isn't the best medium for the kind of writing I'd like to do, but it's what I've got.  I guess that is by way of apology, as I ask this small corner of the blog-reading world to bear with my occasional long lapses.  They do keep me from lapsing into self-indulgence, if nothing else. This weekend we staged a brief escape to the Hudson Valley, which was soft and green and misty, cloaked in the same incredible humidity that makes New York dreary and grey and pea-soupy.  Not that it doesn't still make you sweat, up there, but at least it's pretty.  And the corn is coming, the tomatoes are ripening, there are peaches and plums and they're practically giving the zucchini away!  We came home with produce galore. . . .There is something great about the sheer bounty of summer produce that is completely lost on the supermarket shopper. . . last night, for example I cooked for myself (P was out for a dinner meeting) an entire saute pan of pattypan squash, tossed with lots of fresh garlic and some butter.  (with a side of cooked ground pork that I seasoned like sausage because it needed to be eaten.) THEN I had a huge plate of lettuce and arugula salad (yummy fresh little heads of red and green lettuce) and after THAT a delectably fragrant white peach.   The beauty of HAVING  so many vegetables that are fresh and need to be eaten, or cooked, or canned right away is having to eat them.  Greed becomes necessary. Imagine how wonderful it must have been in the days when winter meant eating nothing but potatoes and salt pork!  We modern supermarket-spoiled humans can eat the same hothouse tomatoes and New Zealand apples all year round and therefore can so easily forget to appreciate the immediate wondrous bounty and the immediate wondrous freshness of this time of year.  No analysis, no history of food, no fancy cooking or political context -- just the pure greedy immediate joy of eating lots and lots of fresh vegetables.  Eating them with intense pleasure because they are going out of season even as they produce, because all this goodness means summer is almost over, and the days of winter squash and potatoes and salt pork are coming again. We had some plums, too -- little red ones that make just one sweet-tart delicious mouthful, but have a clean flavor that lingers so nicely in your mouth as you wait a moment to have another. . . .When they get so ripe, they have to go in the fridge, and then you can repeat the William Carlos Williams poem in your head, especially when you sneak one or two irresistable plums when you are the only one home in the afternoon: This Is Just to Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold I love this poem (be it too-often reprinted and then badly imitated in High School English classes) because it gives such resonance to simple words -- "delicious, sweet, cold."  Let us be reminded, therefore, that the clearest, most simple things (eating most of all) are best described in the fewest, most expressive words.  And  before I'm done I will just add that the wines I've been addicted to drinking these last weeks (a vermentino from the Provencal island of Porquerolles, also an Apremont, which is from near the Alps) are also delicious.  So tart, and so cold.     10:50:20 AM    comment []