Derailed - the embarassing update

Thai style hot sauce

Leaving my private practice and going back to full-time-with-benefits is a great decision, a very interesting new opportunity, and a little stressful (nightmare! What was I thinking! Why oh why did I not check their references? I know they checked mine!) 

My leave-taking was emotional for me and my families; I’ve had several in tears this week. This is good work I do: meaningful, personal, heart work. I see the results of my clinical and personal skills and really, how could I ask for much more?

Well, I have asked for more. I’ve asked for a job with health insurance and paid holidays and less driving around. And I’ve gotten that, and delighted to have it, in this unstable economy.  (But in retrospect, having work that I enjoy and doing it for as long as my beautiful and incredibly supportive wife has health insurance that covers me too — well, there is just more than one way to do things, isn’t there?)

So I’m saying goodbye (so I said goodbye to some and said hello to some new kids just yesterday ) to my current families (with the little ones, I sometimes work with them weekly for as much as two years), and it’s stressy and exciting, and that’s made me tired and the long and short of it is now I’ve got strep throat (babies = germ vectors). Derailed my Nablopomo commitment to post every day for the month of July (topic of the month is food).

Oh well. Maybe next month I’ll earn my merit badge.

I’ll be back after the cold medicine kicks in and try again.

Recipe:

Hot and sour soup is a terrific remedy for sore throats. I make it like this:

Chicken or vegetable broth
Lemon juice
Sriracha
Lemon grass

Heat it up. Drink it hot. Kills germs or at least stuns them.

How to eat like a millionaire

Wow, I love this headline.

I’ll interview all my millionaire friends and let you know. Back soon.

Well, first of all, they tell me billionaire is the new millionaire, so I’m going to raise the bar.

Second — I was thinking it must be all about eco-friendly, sustainable, local food. Rich folk are locavores this week, right? Here’s the food-for-the-rich scenario as I had imagined it (turns out to have been entirely wrong):

“I’ll have my au pair drive to the farmer’s market to buy all the freshest just picked vegetables - the lettuces, the leeks and onions, the rainbow chard, the homemade pies, the early baby creamer potatoes, the hand-salted goat cheese. It can be a lesson in sustainable farming for my seven-year-old. Truffles dug up by my yard man’s farmer friend Joe. Corn and raspberries are hand-picked and delivered to my home weekly.”

As I looked into it, I realized actually that’s how I eat, and I am not a millionaire. Or billionaire. Plus, I don’t have kids, an au pair or a yard man. Wish I did - at least a concierge or something.

How do the very wealthy eat? I did some light reading, and this is what I found. Let’s go look at some of the finest restaurants in the most expensive cities in the world:

According to selected menu items listed in the SPellegrino 50 Best Restaurants in the World, the very wealthy might be eating at this very moment:

Snail Porridge
Bacon and Egg Ice Cream
Warm lettuce hearts soaked in vanilla brine
Sheep’s milk curd seasoned with hay and toasted fern
Beef roasted with the embers of vine cuttings
“Macaroni and Cheese” (butter-poached Maine lobster with mascarpone-enriched Orzo Pasta)
“Oyster and pearls” (”Sabayon” of Pearl Tapioca with Island Creek Oysters and White Sturgeon Caviar)

This convinces me that I am not a billionaire. However, thanks to the beautiful farmer’s market in the small village where I live, I do eat like a millionaire of home-grown tastes. Very sensible of me. Only without the yard guy or the au pair.

With that in mind, here is a recipe for pasta, fresh vegetables and goat cheese with herbs de provence:

Set your pasta water on to boil.

• Prepare your vegetables - chop or slice nice and thin, as you liike it
  (you choose your veggies - this is what we had yesterday):Onion
  Garlic
  Yellow bell pepper
  Yellow squash
  Zucchini
  Fresh oregano
  Herbs de provence - chervil, rosemary, savory, lavendar, tarragon, marjoram, mint (variations are common)
  Goat cheese

Sautee onions and garlic in olive oil. When these are soft and clear, add each vegetable in turn. Cook at a medium-high temperature. Don’t abuse your vegetables by mashing them about with a spatula or boiling them to death. Add a generous splash of vermouth or white wine. Let sit for a moment.

Drain your pasta and dress lightly with oil or butter.

Plate the pasta, sprinkle an ounce or slightly more of goat cheese on it. Spoon the sauteed vegetables on top of all that. Add salt and pepper.

Serve hot, with a glass of chilled white wine. Have some while you are cooking, too, if it seems advisable.
Light mixed green salad on the side.

Life can be relatively easy, can’t it?

Summer fruit in Tuaca

melon boat

Choose a variety of ripe summer melons:

Cantaloupe
Watermelon
Honeydew
Crenshaw

Add some other fruits:
Strawberries
Grapes
Cherries

Other ingredients:
Tuaca
Fresh mint
Juice

Cut one watermelon lengthwise in half to be a melon boat.

Using a melon baller, make a colorful selection of balls. Place in melon boat. Slice and add your other fruits. Add juice (orange, mango,  or watermelon) and a small amount of Tuaca (or Triple Sec, the usual choice), just enough to enhance the flavor of the fruit. Chop the fresh mint and sprinkle on top. Serve chilled in small bowls, on your patio, with your family and friends at a weekend barbecue. Save some for brunch on Sunday morning. Give the melon rinds and other fruit scraps to your geese and chickens!

What’s good for the goose is good for the gardener

Green carpaccio

This morning, I was reading Orion Magazine while eating a mushroom and parsley omelette. There was a review in the magazine of a book called “Recipes for Geese and People” by Natalie Jerminjenko (reviewed by Eric Wagner).

No recipes for goose, cooked or raw, will be found in this book. Rather, it is about the overlapping foods of people and geese. Nice. Pointing out our common ground — quite literally – here is a recipe for a green “carpaccio” taken from the review. In this case, the recipe references the habit geese have of walking on and smashing the fresh green grasses and other growing things in their environment and then eating them fresh, flat and juicy.

Carpaccio typically refers to raw meat (usually beef), smashed flat and thin in parchment paper, then sprinkled with olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper. As you might expect, though, this carpaccio is vegetarian (as are geese).

Here’s the gist of the recipe as reprinted in Orion, modified and paraphrased to suit my mood.

Take a variety of fresh greens — chard, spinach, cabbage, mint, basil (whatever is appealing and available). Wash, trim the tougher stems, blanch briefly in very cold water and pat dry. Lay the leaves flat on a sheet of parchment paper (sturdier leaves on the bottom). Cover. Smash with your hands, then with a rolling pin. Basically you’re massaging the greens to pull out the juices. Peel the paper off, lay flat on a plate, drizzle a bit of olive oil and lemon or balsamic, salt and pepper and serve, as a pesto, or on some very thin crispy crackers, I would think.

I should say that although I am not vegetarian, I am a bit tender about geese (you will know this is you have been reading along). So for me this is a friendly concept that reinforces my sense of geese as part of the larger flock of social animals. Geese and ganders as gourmands not viandes.

What's for dessert?

Summer smoothies

Ingredients:

1 pt. fresh raspberries
4 oz. fresh unsweetened goat yogurt
1 C ice
4 oz. juice (apple or other clear juice, not sweetened or artificial)

Put all of the ingredients in your blender. Put the ice on top, unless your blender is turbo powered. Blend away. Add water or juice (sparingly) as needed to achieve your desired texture.

Makes two 16 oz. servings.

Serve with a little protein on the side to help regulate blood sugar (soy sausage, a hard-boiled egg, a bite of ham, whatever you’ve got that is relatively high in protein but doesn’t add more sugar to this breakfast recipe.

Substitute mango, peach, or any other berry as you wish. Citrus fruits curdle in yogurt, so they don’t really work. Substitute cow yogurt if you must, but goat yogurt is truly excellent in smoothies. Bananas are such a dominant flavor that I do not use them in summer smoothies. In the summer when so many fruits are available fresh and full of their own flavors, choose a fruit that is light and balanced and seasonal.

Fresh foods, prepared simply, simply taste best.